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Abstract Determining the key elements of interconnected infrastructure and complex systems is paramount to ensure system functionality and integrity. This work quantifies the dominance of the networks’ nodes in their respective neighborhoods, introducing a centrality metric, DomiRank, that integrates local and global topological information via a tunable parameter. We present an analytical formula and an efficient parallelizable algorithm for DomiRank centrality, making it applicable to massive networks. From the networks’ structure and function perspective, nodes with high values of DomiRank highlight fragile neighborhoods whose integrity and functionality are highly dependent on those dominant nodes. Underscoring this relation between dominance and fragility, we show that DomiRank systematically outperforms other centrality metrics in generating targeted attacks that effectively compromise network structure and disrupt its functionality for synthetic and real-world topologies. Moreover, we show that DomiRank-based attacks inflict more enduring damage in the network, hindering its ability to rebound and, thus, impairing system resilience. DomiRank centrality capitalizes on the competition mechanism embedded in its definition to expose the fragility of networks, paving the way to design strategies to mitigate vulnerability and enhance the resilience of critical infrastructures.

Abstract Climate-driven changes in precipitation amounts and their seasonal variability are expected in many continental-scale regions during the remainder of the 21st century. However, much less is known about future changes in the predictability of seasonal precipitation, an important earth system property relevant for climate adaptation. Here, on the basis of CMIP6 models that capture the present-day teleconnections between seasonal precipitation and previous-season sea surface temperature (SST), we show that climate change is expected to alter the SST-precipitation relationships and thus our ability to predict seasonal precipitation by 2100. Specifically, in the tropics, seasonal precipitation predictability from SSTs is projected to increase throughout the year, except the northern Amazonia during boreal winter. Concurrently, in the extra-tropics predictability is likely to increase in central Asia during boreal spring and winter. The altered predictability, together with enhanced interannual variability of seasonal precipitation, poses new opportunities and challenges for regional water management.

Abstract Understanding the nature and origin of errors in satellite precipitation products is important for applications and product improvement. Here we propose a new error decomposition scheme incorporating precipitation event (continuous rainy periods) information to characterize satellite errors. Under this framework, the errors are attributed to the inaccuracies in event occurrence, timing (event start/end time), and intensity. The Integrated MultisatellitE Retrieval for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG) is used as our test product to apply the method over CONUS. The above‐listed factors contribute approximately 30%, 20%, and 50% to the total bias, respectively. Significant asymmetry exists in the temporal distribution of biases throughout events: early event endings cause threefold more precipitation amount bias than late event beginnings, while early event beginnings cause fourfold more bias than late event endings. Dominant contributors vary across seasons and regions. The proposed error decomposition provides insight into sources of error for improved retrievals.

Abstract Predicting sediment yield from recently burned areas remains a challenge but is important for hazard and resource management as wildfire impacts increase. Here we use lidar‐based monitoring of two fires in southern California, USA to study the movement of sediment during pre‐rainfall periods and postfire periods of flooding and debris flows over multiple storm events. Using a data‐driven approach, we examine the relative importance of terrain, vegetation, burn severity, and rainfall amounts through time on sediment yield. We show that incipient fire‐activated dry sediment loading and pre‐fire colluvium were rapidly flushed out by debris flows and floods but continued erosion occurred later in the season from soil erosion and, in ∼9% of catchments, from shallow landslides. Based on these observations, we develop random forest regression models to predict dry ravel and incipient runoff‐driven sediment yield applicable to small steep headwater catchments in southern California.

Measurement(s) Wildfire half-daily perimeters and attributes Technology Type(s) Remote sensing Sample Characteristic - Organism Wildfires Sample Characteristic - Environment Ecosystems Sample Characteristic - Location California

Abstract As droughts have widespread social and ecological impacts, it is critical to develop long‐term adaptation and mitigation strategies to reduce drought vulnerability. Climate models are important in quantifying drought changes. Here, we assess the ability of 285 CMIP6 historical simulations, from 17 models, to reproduce drought duration and severity in three observational data sets using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). We used summary statistics beyond the mean and standard deviation, and devised a novel probabilistic framework, based on the Hellinger distance, to quantify the difference between observed and simulated drought characteristics. Results show that many simulations have less than ±10% error in reproducing the observed drought summary statistics. The hypothesis that simulations and observations are described by the same distribution cannot be rejected for more than 80% of the grids based on our H distance framework. No single model stood out as demonstrating consistently better performance over large regions of the globe. The variance in drought statistics among the simulations is higher in the tropics compared to other latitudinal zones. Though the models capture the characteristics of dry spells well, there is considerable bias in low precipitation values. Good model performance in terms of SPI does not imply good performance in simulating low precipitation. Our study emphasizes the need to probabilistically evaluate climate model simulations in order to both pinpoint model weaknesses and identify a subset of best‐performing models that are useful for impact assessments.

Abstract Fire emissions of gases and aerosols alter atmospheric composition and have substantial impacts on climate, ecosystem function, and human health. Warming climate and human expansion in fire‐prone landscapes exacerbate fire impacts and call for more effective management tools. Here we developed a global fire forecasting system that predicts monthly emissions using past fire data and climate variables for lead times of 1 to 6 months. Using monthly fire emissions from the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) as the prediction target, we fit a statistical time series model, the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average model with eXogenous variables (ARIMAX), in over 1,300 different fire regions. Optimized parameters were then used to forecast future emissions. The forecast system took into account information about region‐specific seasonality, long‐term trends, recent fire observations, and climate drivers representing both large‐scale climate variability and local fire weather. We cross‐validated the forecast skill of the system with different combinations of predictors and forecast lead times. The reference model, which combined endogenous and exogenous predictors with a 1 month forecast lead time, explained 52% of the variability in the global fire emissions anomaly, considerably exceeding the performance of a reference model that assumed persistent emissions during the forecast period. The system also successfully resolved detailed spatial patterns of fire emissions anomalies in regions with significant fire activity. This study bridges the gap between the efforts of near‐real‐time fire forecasts and seasonal fire outlooks and represents a step toward establishing an operational global fire, smoke, and carbon cycle forecasting system.

ENSO is losing predictive power of west US coast precipitation. Here the authors identify a new inter-hemispheric teleconnection that promises earlier and more accurate prediction.

Abstract Network robustness against attacks has been widely studied in fields as diverse as the Internet, power grids and human societies. But current definition of robustness is only accounting for half of the story: the connectivity of the nodes unaffected by the attack. Here we propose a new framework to assess network robustness, wherein the connectivity of the affected nodes is also taken into consideration, acknowledging that it plays a crucial role in properly evaluating the overall network robustness in terms of its future recovery from the attack. Specifically, we propose a dual perspective approach wherein at any instant in the network evolution under attack, two distinct networks are defined: (i) the Active Network (AN) composed of the unaffected nodes and (ii) the Idle Network (IN) composed of the affected nodes. The proposed robustness metric considers both the efficiency of destroying the AN and that of building-up the IN. We show, via analysis of well-known prototype networks and real world data, that trade-offs between the efficiency of Active and Idle Network dynamics give rise to surprising robustness crossovers and re-rankings, which can have significant implications for decision making.

This paper studies the role of sparse regularisation in a properly chosen basis for variational data assimilation (VDA) problems. Specifically, it focuses on data assimilation of noisy and down-sampled observations while the state variable of interest exhibits sparsity in the real or transform domains. We show that in the presence of sparsity, the l1-norm regularisation produces more accurate and stable solutions than the classic VDA methods. We recast the VDA problem under the l1-norm regularisation into a constrained quadratic programming problem and propose an efficient gradient-based approach, suitable for large-dimensional systems. The proof of concept is examined via assimilation experiments in the wavelet and spectral domain using the linear advection–diffusion equation.

Multiplex networks have been intensively studied during the last few years as they offer a more realistic representation of many interdependent and multilevel complex networked systems. However, even if most real networks have some degree of directionality, the vast majority of the existent literature deals with multiplex networks where all layers are undirected. Here, we study the dynamics of diffusion processes acting on coupled multilayer networks where at least one layer consists of a directed graph; we call these directed multiplex networks. We reveal a new and unexpected signature of diffusion dynamics on directed multiplex networks, namely, that different from their undirected counterparts, they can exhibit a nonmonotonic rate of convergence to steady state as a function of the degree of coupling, resulting in a faster diffusion at an intermediate degree of coupling than when the two layers are fully coupled. We use synthetic multiplex examples and real-world topologies to illustrate the characteristics of the underlying dynamics that give rise to a regime in which an optimal coupling exists. We further provide analytical and numerical evidence that this new phenomenon is solely a property of directed multiplex, where at least one of the layers exhibits sufficient directionality quantified by a normalized metric of asymmetry in directional path lengths. Given the ubiquity of both directed and multilayer networks in nature, our results have important implications for studying the dynamics of multilevel complex systems.