ClimBurst: A Novel Method to Detect Climatological Anomalies Over Time and Space

Abstract

Detecting abnormal climate events across temporal and spatial scales is crucial to the understanding of local and regional climate trends. Existing methods often depend on prior knowledge about the timing, location, or duration of such events, limiting their versatility. This study introduces ClimBurst, an approach to detect climate bursts (unusually high or low values of climate variables) without prior assumptions about their temporal duration. ClimBurst offers the ability to: (a) identify climate bursts of any duration within the time series of single locations, (b) link climate bursts across neighboring locations, and (c) analyze the spatio-temporal propagation of these anomalies. Applying ClimBurst to sea surface temperature data from the Mediterranean Sea (1960–2021) shows some detected hot bursts and anomalies coincide in time with known severe marine heatwaves. ClimBurst also shows how detected hot (cold) bursts are spatio-temporally connected and this connected bursts have increased (decreased) in duration, intensity, spatial extent and frequency historically.