Climate network stability measures of El Niño variability

One of the crucial aspects that is currently limiting the success of El Niño predictions is the stability of the slowly varying Pacific climate state. This property determines whether or not sea surface temperature perturbations will be amplified by coupled ocean-atmosphere feedbacks. The so-called Bjerknes stability index has been developed for this purpose, but its evaluation is severely constrained by data availability. Here, we present new network based measures of the stability of the Pacific climate state. These measures can be evaluated by using only sea surface temperature data and efficiently indicate whether positive feedbacks of perturbations to the climate state will occur.