A preliminary investigation on the topology of Chinese and climate networks

Complex networks have been studied across many fields of sciencein recent years. In this paper, we give a brief introduction ofnetworks, then follow the original works by Tsonis et al(2004, 2006) starting with data of the surface temperature from 160Chinese weather observations to investigate the topology ofChinese climate networks. Results show that the Chinese climate networkexhibits a characteristic of regular, almost fully connectednetworks, which means that most nodes in this case have the same numberof links, and so-called super nodes with a very large number oflinks do not exist there. In other words, though former results showthat nodes in the extratropical region provide a property ofscale-free networks, they still have other different local finestructures inside. We also detect the community of the Chineseclimate network by using a Bayesian technique; the effective numberof communities of the Chinese climate network is about four in thisnetwork. More importantly, this technique approaches results indivisions which have connections with physics and dynamics; thedivision into communities may highlight the aspects of the dynamicsof climate variability.