TY - GEN A1 - Ciemer, Catrin A1 - Rehm, Lars A1 - Kurths, Jürgen A1 - Donner, Reik Volker A1 - Winkelmann, Ricarda A1 - Boers, Niklas T1 - An early-warning indicator for Amazon droughts exclusively based on tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Droughts in tropical South America have an imminent and severe impact on the Amazon rainforest and affect the livelihoods of millions of people. Extremely dry conditions in Amazonia have been previously linked to sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the adjacent tropical oceans. Although the sources and impacts of such droughts have been widely studied, establishing reliable multi-year lead statistical forecasts of their occurrence is still an ongoing challenge. Here, we further investigate the relationship between SST and rainfall anomalies using a complex network approach. We identify four ocean regions which exhibit the strongest overall SST correlations with central Amazon rainfall, including two particularly prominent regions in the northern and southern tropical Atlantic. Based on the time-dependent correlation between SST anomalies in these two regions alone, we establish a new early-warning method for droughts in the central Amazon basin and demonstrate its robustness in hindcasting past major drought events with lead-times up to 18 months. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 1207 KW - complex networks KW - droughts KW - prediction KW - Amazon rainforest Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-525863 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 9 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Levermann, Anders A1 - Winkelmann, Ricarda T1 - A simple equation for the melt elevation feedback of ice sheets T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - In recent decades, the Greenland Ice Sheet has been losing mass and has thereby contributed to global sea-level rise. The rate of ice loss is highly relevant for coastal protection worldwide. The ice loss is likely to increase under future warming. Beyond a critical temperature threshold, a meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet is induced by the self-enforcing feedback between its lowering surface elevation and its increasing surface mass loss: the more ice that is lost, the lower the ice surface and the warmer the surface air temperature, which fosters further melting and ice loss. The computation of this rate so far relies on complex numerical models which are the appropriate tools for capturing the complexity of the problem. By contrast we aim here at gaining a conceptual understanding by deriving a purposefully simple equation for the self-enforcing feedback which is then used to estimate the melt time for different levels of warming using three observable characteristics of the ice sheet itself and its surroundings. The analysis is purely conceptual in nature. It is missing important processes like ice dynamics for it to be useful for applications to sea-level rise on centennial timescales, but if the volume loss is dominated by the feedback, the resulting logarithmic equation unifies existing numerical simulations and shows that the melt time depends strongly on the level of warming with a critical slow-down near the threshold: the median time to lose 10% of the present-day ice volume varies between about 3500 years for a temperature level of 0.5 degrees C above the threshold and 500 years for 5 degrees C. Unless future observations show a significantly higher melting sensitivity than currently observed, a complete meltdown is unlikely within the next 2000 years without significant ice-dynamical contributions. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 529 KW - sea-level rise KW - mass-balance KW - climate-change KW - Greenland KW - model KW - glacier KW - projections KW - dynamics KW - impact KW - 21st-Century Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-409834 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 529 ER -