Climate as complex networks

The field of complex networks has emerged as an important area of science to generate novel insights into nature of complex systems^[1] The application of network theory to climate science is a young and emerging field.^[2][3][4] To identify and analyze patterns in global climate, scientists model climate data as complex networks.

Unlike most real-world networks where nodes and edges are well defined, in climate networks, nodes are identified as the sites in a spatial grid of the underlying global climate data set, which can be represented at various resolutions. Two nodes are connected by an edge depending on the degree of statistical similarity (that may be related to dependence) between the corresponding pairs of time-series taken from climate records.^[3][5] The climate network approach enables novel insights into the dynamics of the climate system over different spatial and temporal scales.^[3]