Chaotic Attractor Crisis and Climate Sensitivity: a Transfer Operator Approach

Abstract:

The rough response to a smooth parameter change of some non-chaotic climate models, such as the warm to snowball-Earth transition in energy balance models due to the ice-albedo feedback, can be studied in the framework of bifurcation theory, in particular by analysing the Lyapunov spectrum of fixed points or periodic orbits. However, bifurcation theory is of little help to study the destruction of a chaotic attractor which can occur in high-dimensional General Circulation Models (GCM). Yet, one would expect critical slowing down to occur before the crisis, since, as the system becomes susceptible to the physical instability mechanism responsible for the crisis, it turns out to be less and less resilient to exogenous perturbations and to spontaneous fluctuations due to other types of instabilities on the attractor.

The statistical physics framework, extended to nonequilibrium systems, is particularly well suited for the study of global properties of chaotic and stochastic systems. In particular, the semigroup of transfer operators governs the evolution of distributions in phase space and its spectrum characterises both the relaxation rate of distributions to a statistical steady-state and the stability of this steady-state to perturbations. If critical slowing down indeed occurs in the approach to an attractor crisis, the gap in the spectrum of the semigroup of transfer operators is expected to shrink.

We show that the chaotic attractor crisis due to the ice-albedo feedback and resulting in a transition from a warm to a snowball-Earth in the Planet Simulator (PlaSim), a GCM of intermediate complexity, is associated with critical slowing down, as observed by the slower decay of correlations before the crisis (cf. left panel). In addition, we demonstrate that this critical slowing down can be traced back to the shrinkage of the gap between the leading eigenvalues of coarse-grained approximations of the transfer operators and that these eigenvalues capture the fundamental features of the attractor crisis (cf. right panel). Finally, that the spectral gap is small close to the crisis suggests that the linear concept of Climate Sensitivity may be applied only far from an attractor crisis.