On the Impacts of El Nino Events: A New Monitoring Approach Using Complex Network Analysis

摘要

It is well known that El Nino events can induce worldwide impacts. However, the fact that strong El Nino events do not necessarily induce strong impacts raises a new research question: how to estimate the impacts of El Nino events in advance? To address this question, we studied the El Nino impacts from the perspective of complex network. By comparing the results from five El Nino 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 Nino impacts. This phenomenon was used to explain the less-than-expected impacts of the strong 2015/2016 El Nino, which is suggested more like a Central Pacific-Eastern Pacific mixed El Nino. To monitor the impacts objectively, we further proposed an index, which can be used in real-time operations.