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Over the past decade, climate networks have emerged as a powerful tool to characterise high dimensional weather and climate datasets. Climate networks are a sparse representation of the dynamical similarities between weather time series from different geographical locations. Nodes represent the locations themselves, and network edges represent high dynamical similarity between pairs of locations. The topology of the resulting complex network encodes information about how atmospheric and oceanic dynamics “connect” different locations. For instance, strong monsoon years might yield a different network structure than weak monsoon years. With the tools of graph theory and complex networks at our disposal, we can characterise climate dynamics in novel and interesting ways, which yield, in part, results that corroborate what meteorologists already know, and, in part, results that generate new hypotheses about how atmospheric and oceanic processes influence different weather patterns. In this...

The main focus of these pedagogical talks will be on discussing the interplay between statistics and climate science as a two-way street. On one hand, thinking about the climate helps us understand many aspects of statistics, from the fundamental to conceptual to practical. On the other, statistical thinking is crucial and indispensable in studying climate. I will also emphasize that statistics plays an important role not just in climate studies, but more generally in understanding any complex system such as those from biological and social sciences as well. Another thread will be the discussion of interplay between uncertainty and dynamics, with an emphasis on the role of dynamical instabilities.

Oceanic flows stir and mix tracers such heat, salt, carbon, and plankton and understanding the details of the tracer dispersion is key to developing effective parameterizations for large climate-scale models. Unfortunately, the flow structure in the ocean is highly variable as a function of spatial scales. For instance O(100 km) mesoscale flows are significantly different from O(10 km) submesoscale flows. In this talk I'll use results from a recent study to explain how tracer dispersion characteristics change as we move from large mesoscales to small submesoscales in the oceans.

I present the recurrence analysis of temperature and relative humidity data from various locations spread over India, including the mountainous region, coastal region, and central and north eastern parts of India. This study reveals the spatiotemporal pattern underlying the climate dynamics and captures the variations in the complexity of the dynamics over the period 1948 to 2022. By reconstructing the dynamics from data, the recurrence pattern is studied using recurrence networks and the measures of the networks computed using a sliding window analysis on the data sets. This brings out the climate variability in different spatial locations and the heterogeneity across the locations chosen. The variations observed in dynamics can be correlated with reported shifts in the climate related to strong and moderate El Niño–Southern Oscillation events.

Critical transitions, relatively sudden transitions between qualitatively different dynamics, are due to various distinct mechanisms. So far, bifurcation induced, noise- induced, shock-induced or rate-induced transitions have been studied extensively. In complex systems like the climate system or ecosystems, particularly in coupled versions of them, the dynamics of different components or different subsystems is characterized by different timescales. One simple example are ecosystems exhibiting allometric slowing down, that means that the duration of lifecycles increases with the trophic level. Coupling different compartments of the climate system involves also different timescales as the intrinsic timescales of flow patterns in the atmosphere are much faster than in the ocean. To study the dynamics of such systems requires the use of the methodology of slow-fast systems to account properly for such timescale separation. We will discuss the concept of critical manifolds in slow-fast sy...

Complex networks have revolutionised the way non-linear dynamical (deterministic and stochastic) systems are represented and analysed. This paradigm shift owes itself to the ability to encode non-linear relationships in a hierarchical manner from the skeletal structure to deeper and subtle spatio-temporal dependencies. This talk aims to provide an overview of a class of complex networks known as causal networks that draw ideas from various fields including econometrics, social sciences, neuroscience, sciences, ecology and engineering. Of specific interest and relevance are the causal climate networks. The first half of the talk shall be devoted the overview and mathematical formalism of different types of (climate) causal networks with focus on Granger causal and convergent cross-mapping (CCM) class of networks, both of which are constructed from time-series data. The second part of this talk is devoted to a presentation of applications to reconstructing climate networks from data and ...

A brief tour of Chaos in 1-dimensional maps followed by a quick primer on Machine Learning. This will help researchers in Climate Science as there is an increasing use of AI/ML methods in this domain.