Climate Change Effects through MFDFA Study of Temperature in Serbia

We investigate multifractal properties of daily means of air temperature over the territory of Serbia, by using Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. Temperature anomalies in two periods 1961–1990 and 1991–2020 are calculated from the E-OBSv26.0e gridded dataset with 0.10° (~12 km) resolution, totaling 1278 daily temperature series for each period. The MFDFA parameters: position of the maximum of the spectrum α0, width of the spectrum W and asymmetry r, obtained from the total of 2556 MFDFA runs are interpolated to yield their spatial distribution across Serbia in the two periods. We found several patterns in both the spatial distribution, and changes from first to second period. All series showed multifractal properties with overall persistent long-term correlations (α0 > 0.5) and the dominance of small fluctuations (r > 0). The persistence is weaker (smaller α0 values) and multifractality is stronger (larger width W) in southern mountainous regions. In the second period the values of α0 increased indicating stronger persistence of temperature dynamics, while multifractality became stronger (larger W) in northern region and weaker (smaller W) in southern region. In both periods the contribution to multifractality was dominated by small fluctuations (r > 0) that become stronger in the second period, indicated by the increase of the values of r over most of the country’s area. These changes in the values of multifractal parameters indicate the increase of complexity of temperature dynamics in the second 30 years period which could be related to climate change.