English
 
Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

Percolation analysis of the atmospheric structure

Authors

Sun,  Yu
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/jun.meng

Meng,  Jun
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

Yao,  Qing
External Organizations;

Saberi,  Abbas Ali
External Organizations;

Chen,  Xiaosong
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/Jingfang.Fan

Fan,  Jingfang
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

/persons/resource/Juergen.Kurths

Kurths,  Jürgen
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

External Ressource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (public)

27048.pdf
(Publisher version), 6MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Sun, Y., Meng, J., Yao, Q., Saberi, A. A., Chen, X., Fan, J., Kurths, J. (2021): Percolation analysis of the atmospheric structure. - Physical Review E, 104, 6, 064139.
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.104.064139


Cite as: https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_27048
Abstract
The atmosphere is a thermo-hydrodynamical complex system and provides oxygen to most animal life at the Earth's surface. However, the detection of complexity for the atmosphere remains elusive and debated. Here we develop a percolation-based framework to explore its structure by using the global air temperature field. We find that the percolation threshold is much delayed compared with the prototypical percolation model and the giant cluster eventually emerges explosively. A finite-size-scaling analysis reveals that the observed transition in each atmosphere layer is genuine discontinuous. Furthermore, at the percolation threshold, we uncover that the boundary of the giant cluster is self-affine, with fractal dimension df, and can be utilized to quantify the atmospheric complexity. Specifically, our results indicate that the complexity of the atmosphere decreases superlinearly with height, i.e., the complexity is higher at the surface than at the top layer and vice versa, due to the atmospheric boundary forcings. The proposed methodology may evaluate and improve our understanding regarding the critical phenomena of the complex Earth system and can be used as a benchmark tool to test the performance of Earth system models.