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Journal Article

Community structure of tropics emerging from spatio-temporal variations in the Intertropical Convergence Zone dynamics

Authors

Chopra,  Gaurav
External Organizations;

Unni,  Vishnu R.
External Organizations;

Venkatesan,  Praveenkumar
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/sara.bernal

Vallejo Bernal,  Sara Maria
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

/persons/resource/Marwan

Marwan,  Norbert
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

/persons/resource/Juergen.Kurths

Kurths,  Jürgen
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

Sujith,  R. I.
External Organizations;

External Ressource

https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47
(Supplementary material)

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7882558
(Supplementary material)

Fulltext (public)

Chopra_2024_s41598-024-73872-0.pdf
(Publisher version), 9MB

Supplementary Material (public)

Chopra_etal_2024_Supplement.pdf
(Supplementary material), 5MB

Citation

Chopra, G., Unni, V. R., Venkatesan, P., Vallejo Bernal, S. M., Marwan, N., Kurths, J., Sujith, R. I. (2024): Community structure of tropics emerging from spatio-temporal variations in the Intertropical Convergence Zone dynamics. - Scientific Reports, 14, 24463.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-73872-0


Cite as: https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_30465
Abstract
The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is a narrow tropical belt of deep convective clouds, intense precipitation, and monsoon circulations encircling the Earth. Complex interactions between the ITCZ and local geophysical dynamics result in high climate variability, making weather forecasting and prediction of extreme rainfall or drought events challenging. We unravel the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of the ITCZ and the resulting teleconnection patterns via a novel tropical climate classification achieved using complex network analysis and community detection. We reduce the high-dimensional complex ITCZ dynamics into a simple yet insightful community structure that classifies the tropics into seven regions representing distinct ITCZ dynamics. The two largest communities, encompassing landmasses over the Northern and Southern hemispheres, are associated with coherent seasonal ITCZ dynamics and have significant long-range connections. Temporal analysis of the community structure highlights that the tropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans communities exhibit substantial variation on multidecadal scales. Further, these communities exhibit incoherent dynamics due to atmosphere-ocean interactions driven by equatorial and coastal oceanic upwelling.