Constructing regional climate networks in the Amazonia during recent drought events

PLoS One. 2017 Oct 17;12(10):e0186145. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186145. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Climate networks are powerful approaches to disclose tele-connections in climate systems and to predict severe climate events. Here we construct regional climate networks from precipitation data in the Amazonian region and focus on network properties under the recent drought events in 2005 and 2010. Both the networks of the entire Amazon region and the extreme networks resulted from locations severely affected by drought events suggest that network characteristics show slight difference between the two drought events. Based on network degrees of extreme drought events and that without drought conditions, we identify regions of interest that are correlated to longer expected drought period length. Moreover, we show that the spatial correlation length to the regions of interest decayed much faster in 2010 than in 2005, which is because of the dual roles played by both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The results suggest that hub nodes in the regional climate network of Amazonia have fewer long-range connections when more severe drought conditions appeared in 2010 than that in 2005.

MeSH terms

  • Atlantic Ocean
  • Climate*
  • Droughts*
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Pacific Ocean
  • Rain
  • Seasons
  • Temperature

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11305062), and the São Paulo Research Foundation (Grant No. FAPESP/DFG-IRTG 1740/TRP, FAPESP/DFG-IRTG, 2015/50122-0, No. 2014/14229-2, No. 2015/07373-2, and No. 2015/23607-3).