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On the Impacts of El Niño Events: A New Monitoring Approach Using Complex Network Analysis
Author(s) -
Lu Zhenghui,
Yuan Naiming,
Chen Lin,
Gong Zhiqiang
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2019gl086533
Subject(s) - environmental science , perspective (graphical) , complex network , climatology , oceanography , meteorology , computer science , geography , geology , artificial intelligence , world wide web
It is well known that El Niño events can induce worldwide impacts. However, the fact that strong El Niño events do not necessarily induce strong impacts raises a new research question: how to estimate the impacts of El Niño events in advance? To address this question, we studied the El Niño impacts from the perspective of complex network. By comparing the results from five El Niño events with distinct impacts, we found that the phase transition of the surface air temperature network over tropical Pacific is closely related to the El Niño impacts. This phenomenon was used to explain the less‐than‐expected impacts of the strong 2015/2016 El Niño, which is suggested more like a Central Pacific‐Eastern Pacific mixed El Niño. To monitor the impacts objectively, we further proposed an index, which can be used in real‐time operations.