Complexity Analysis of Global Temperature Time Series

Climate has complex dynamics due to the plethora of phenomena underlying its evolution. These characteristics pose challenges to conducting solid quantitative analysis and reaching assertive conclusions. In this paper, the global temperature time series (TTS) is viewed as a manifestation of the climate evolution, and its complexity is calculated by means of four different indices, namely the Lempel–Ziv complexity, sample entropy, signal harmonics power ratio, and fractal dimension. In the first phase, the monthly mean TTS is pre-processed by means of empirical mode decomposition, and the TTS trend is calculated. In the second phase, the complexity of the detrended signals is estimated. The four indices capture distinct features of the TTS dynamics in a 4-dim space. Hierarchical clustering is adopted for dimensional reduction and visualization in the 2-dim space. The results show that TTS complexity exhibits space-time variability, suggesting the presence of distinct climate forcing processes in both dimensions. Numerical examples with real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.