Transition process of abrupt climate change based on global sea surface temperature over the past century

Abstract

A new detection method has been proposed to study the transition process of abrupt climate change. With this method, the climate system transiting from one stable state to another can be verified clearly. By applying this method to the global sea surface temperature over the past century, several climate changes and their processes are detected, including the start state (moment), persist time, and end state (moment). According to the spatial distribution, the locations of climate changes mainly have occurred in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific before the middle twentieth century, in the 1970s in the equatorial middle-eastern Pacific, and in the middle and southern Pacific since the end of the twentieth century. In addition, the quantitative relationship between the transition process parameters is verified in theory and practice: (1) the relationship between the rate and stability parameters is linear, and (2) the relationship between the rate and change amplitude parameters is quadratic.