Monitoring the Multiple Stages of Climate Tipping Systems from Space: Do the GCOS Essential Climate Variables Meet the Needs?

Abstract

Many components of the Earth system feature self-reinforcing feedback processes that can potentially scale up a small initial change to a fundamental state change of the underlying system in a sometimes abrupt or irreversible manner beyond a critical threshold. Such tipping points can be found across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and are expressed in very different observable variables. For example, early-warning signals of approaching critical transitions may manifest in localised spatial pattern formation of vegetation within years as observed for the Amazon rainforest. In contrast, the susceptibility of ice sheets to tipping dynamics can unfold at basin to sub-continental scales, over centuries to even millennia. Accordingly, to improve the understanding of the underlying processes, to capture present-day system states and to monitor early-warning signals, tipping point science relies on diverse data products. To that end, Earth observation has proven indispensable as it provides a broad range of data products with varying spatio-temporal scales and resolutions. Here we review the observable characteristics of selected potential climate tipping systems associated with the multiple stages of a tipping process: This includes i) gaining system and process understanding, ii) detecting early-warning signals for resilience loss when approaching potential tipping points and iii) monitoring progressing tipping dynamics across scales in space and time. By assessing how well the observational requirements are met by the Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) defined by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), we identify gaps in the portfolio and what is needed to better characterise potential candidate tipping elements. Gaps have been identified for the Amazon forest system (vegetation water content), permafrost (ground subsidence), Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, AMOC (section mass, heat and fresh water transports and freshwater input from ice sheet edges) and ice sheets (e.g. surface melt). For many of the ECVs, issues in specifications have been identified. Of main concern are spatial resolution and missing variables, calling for an update of the ECVS or a separate, dedicated catalogue of tipping variables.

Keywords: Earth Observation; Essential Climate Variables; GCOS; Tipping points.

Fig. 1

Earth observation opportunities to monitor tipping across scales. Tipping occurs in systems where positive feedback loops maintain change beyond a critical forcing threshold. These dynamics can play out on different spatial scales depending on the range of the feedbacks – tipping on large scales can be the consequence of either a feedback spanning a wide (macro) range, a regional feedback that propagates to larger scales, or local feedbacks that act independently but are subject to the same external conditions and thereby synchronise over large spatial extents (see Lenton et al. 2024)

Fig. 2

Dominant feedback loops in ice sheets. Based on Zeitz (2022) and Lenton et al. (2023)

Fig. 3

Key feedbacks in the Amazon rainforest are vegetation-rainfall and vegetation-fire

Fig. 4

The salt-advection feedback as one key positive feedback driving the Atlantic Meridional Overturning circulation and Subpolar Gyre, based on Loriani et al., (2023)