Precursors of the El Ni\~no Phenomenon: A climate network analysis

Abstract

The identification of precursors of climatic phenomena has enormous practical importance. Recent work constructs a climate network based on surface air temperature data to analyze the El Ni\~no phenomena. We utilize microtransitions which occur before the discontinuous percolation transition in the network as well as other network quantities to identify a set of reliable precursors of El Ni\~no episodes. These precursors identify nine out of twelve El Ni\~no episodes occurring in the period of 1979 to 2018 with a lead time varying from six to ten months. We also find indicators of tipping events in the data.