Potential analysis reveals changing number of climate states during the last 60 kyr
We develop and apply a new statistical method of potential analysis for detecting the number of states of a geophysical system, from its recorded time series. Estimation of the degree of a polynomial potential allows us to derive the number of potential wells in a system. The method correctly detect...
| Published in: | Climate of the Past |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
2010
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/20357/ https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-6-77-2010 |
| Summary: | We develop and apply a new statistical method of potential analysis for detecting the number of states of a geophysical system, from its recorded time series. Estimation of the degree of a polynomial potential allows us to derive the number of potential wells in a system. The method correctly detects changes in the number of wells in artificial data. In ice-core proxy records of Greenland paleotemperature, a reduction in the number of climate states from two to one is detected sometime prior to the last glacial maximum (LGM), 23-19 kyr BP. This result is also found in analysis of Greenland Ca data. The bifurcation can be interpreted as loss of stability of the warm interstadial state of the Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events. The proposed method can be applied to a wide range of geophysical time series exhibiting bifurcations. |
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