A preliminary investigation on the topology of Chinese and climate networks
Wang Ge-Li(王革丽)a)† and Anastasios A Tsonisb)
a Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China; b Department of Mathematical Sciences, Atmospheric Sciences Group, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA
Abstract Complex networks have been studied across many fields of science in recent years. In this paper, we give a brief introduction of networks, then follow the original works by Tsonis et al (2004, 2006) starting with data of the surface temperature from 160 Chinese weather observations to investigate the topology of Chinese climate networks. Results show that the Chinese climate network exhibits a characteristic of regular, almost fully connected networks, which means that most nodes in this case have the same number of links, and so-called super nodes with a very large number of links do not exist there. In other words, though former results show that nodes in the extratropical region provide a property of scale-free networks, they still have other different local fine structures inside. We also detect the community of the Chinese climate network by using a Bayesian technique; the effective number of communities of the Chinese climate network is about four in this network. More importantly, this technique approaches results in divisions which have connections with physics and dynamics; the division into communities may highlight the aspects of the dynamics of climate variability.
Received: 05 December 2008
Revised: 20 April 2009
Accepted manuscript online:
PACS:
93.85.Bc
(Computational methods and data processing, data acquisition and storage)
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