Sun-Climate Complexity Linking

Abstract

It is known that Earth's short-term temperature anomalies share the same complexity index as solar flares. We show that this property is not accidental and is a consequence of the phenomenon of information transfer based on the crucial role of non-Poisson renewal events in complex networks. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.088501 PACS numbers: 92.60.Ry, 05.20.ÿy, 05.40.Fb A cornerstone of statistical physics is the fluctuationdissipation theorem (FDT) of the first kind and the linear response theory (LRT) of Kubo [1] on which it rests. Recently, with the increasing importance of phenomena whose statistics do not satisfy the central limit theorem, a special version of the FDT was developed to study the response of renewal non-Poisson networks to external perturbations. This theory is a kind of generalization of the well-known theory of stochastic resonance (SR) proposed in 1981 to explain the periodic recurrence of ice ages [2]. The current generalization is called the event dominated fluctuation-dissipation theorem (EDFDT) of the first kind [3,4] and leads to the remarkable result that under certain conditions a complex network being perturbed by a second complex network takes on the statistical properties of the perturbation. This is the complexity matching (CM) phenomenon recently proposed by the authors of Ref. [5] involving the transfer of information, rather than energy, and can be realized with a perturbative linking of extremely weak intensity [4]. CM is expected to apply to all processes dominated by crucial renewal events, as has been shown in the case of earthquakes [6], blinking quantum dots [3], and brain dynamics [7]. Herein we apply this theory to the linking of Earth's climate to total solar irradiance (TSI). The average global temperature is a consequence of the TSI being absorbed and redistributed by Earth's atmosphere and oceans by means of nonlinear hydrothermal dynamic processes [8]. In the past two decades this phenomenon has been framed as a large-scale numerical simulation incorporating all identified physical or chemical mechanisms in an attempt to recreate and understand the variability in Earth's temperature time series [9]. What is not addressed in these simulations, over and above the temperature increase of the past 30 years, are the statistics of the average global temperature and the reasons why the statistics of the temperature anomalies are not Poisson, Gaussian, or any of the other elementary statistical distributions [10,11].Earth's surface temperature responds to variations in the TSI, which can be partitioned into low-frequency quasicycles and the more high-frequency random fluctuations. The low amplitude, approximately 11-year solar cycle influence on climate is well studied, leading to, for example, the decadal oscillation in the stratosphere and troposphere, as well as the resonant excitation of La Nina [12]. On the other hand, on the basis of large-scale computer simulations (see, for example, [13]), the highfrequency random fluctuations in solar activity have been found ...

A model of return intervals between earthquake events

“…Then we construct the process n k (t) which is the number of events during nonoverlapping time interval of duration t much smaller than t obs , starting at kΔt, n k (t) = [t/Δt] i=0 ξ i+k , so that one has a statistics of event occurrence in different time intervals of the same duration t. In total, we have N = [(t obs − t)/Δt] intervals and the corresponding n(t). Building a histogram of occurrence frequencies of different n for fixed t, we get an estimate for the probability P n which depends on t as a parameter: P n (t) is the probability of the occurrence of n events in an interval with a given duration t. Now, we can define the Shannon entropy S(t) = − n P n (t) ln[P n (t)], which depends on the interval duration t. The DEA investigates the S(t) dependence on t, which can be written as [22][23][24]. The SDA is based on investigating the t-dependence of the standard deviation of n k (t): 2 , where the averages are taken over all values of k. The typical dependence corresponds to a power law D(t) ∼ t H .…”

“…Such a behavior with H = 0.5 is a manifestation of anomalous diffusion processes [25,26]. The DEA and SDA were wildly applied to a variety of problems ranging from the DNA sequence to geoscience problems [23][24][25], especially the study of temporal structure of earthquakes and property of mainshocks [19][20][21].…”

Stochastic modeling of the AE index and its relation to fluctuations in Bz of the IMF on time scales shorter than substorm duration

“…It has been proposed [ West and Grigolini , 2008] that a “complexity linking” between solar activity and Earth climate dynamics could lead to similar statistical properties of the solar flare index and Earth's global surface temperature on time scales much shorter than the sunspot period. In a recent paper [ Rypdal and Rypdal , 2010] we demonstrate that the observational evidence originally presented in favor of this hypothesis by Scafetta and West [2003] is false, but a similar linking between fluctuations in B z at Earth's orbit and the auroral electrojet seems much more plausible and deserves investigation by similar methods.…”

Testing Hypotheses about Sun-Climate Complexity Linking

“…In a series of papers Nicola Scafetta, Bruce J. West and Paolo Grigolini suggest the existence of a "complexity linking" between solar activity and earth global temperature [1][2][3]. It is contended that stochastic signatures in the solar flare index (SFI) can be observed in the global temperature anomaly (GTA) on time scales shorter that the 11-year sunspot period, because their analysis indicates that the two time records share properties characteristic of a Lévy walk.…”