Tipping point analysis of European freshwater accounts

In this paper, European freshwater accounts are studied and analyzed to identify how freshwater volumes are distributed around Europe and how they have changed in the past few decades. Specifically, a drought event in the United Kingdom is analyzed, when water abstraction in the 1990s was reduced at a fast pace, changing to a different system state, thus representing a tipping point. Tipping point analysis (its potential forecasting technique) is applied to obtain the hindcast, i.e., forecast in the past, and demonstrates that the hindcast is in agreement with the observed data. Forecasting tipping events, which exemplify nonstationary behavior of a dynamical system, is the most challenging task in time series analysis, and the results demonstrate the promising capability of this technique in forecasting critical transitions.