Analyzing changes in the complexity of climate in the last four decades using MERRA-2 radiation data

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 922
• Main Authors: Delgado-Bonal, Alfonso, Marshak, Alexander, Yang, Yuekui, Holdaway, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 22-01-2020; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 639/766/530; 704/106/35; Climate; Climate change; Climatology; Energy balance; Entropy; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-57917-8

The energy balance of the Earth is controlled by the shortwave and longwave radiation emitted to space. Changes in the thermodynamic state of the system over time affect climate and are noticeable when viewing the system as a whole. In this paper, we study the changes in the complexity of climate in the last four decades using data from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). First, we study the complexity of the shortwave and longwave radiation fields independently using Approximate Entropy and Sample Entropy, observing that the rate of complexity change is faster for shortwave radiation. Then, we study the causality of those changes using Transfer Entropy to capture the non-linear dynamics of climate, showing that the changes are mainly driven by the variations in shortwave radiation. The observed behavior of climatic complexity could be explained by the changes in cloud amount, and we research that possibility by investigating its evolution from a complexity perspective using data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP).