Analysis of Abrupt Changes in CMIP6 Models Using Edge Detection

Many potential tipping elements have been identified in the climate system over the last decade, although some of them are surrounded by large uncertainties. We perform an updated analysis of abrupt changes in current state-of-the-art climate models to re-evaluate the evidence of these shifts—whether they are tipping points or not. We examine all CMIP6 models (59 in total) under the 1pctCO2 scenario using a Canny edge detection method—adapted for spatiotemporal dimensions—to detect abrupt shifts in climate data. We perform this semi-automatic analysis on 83 two-dimensional variables of the ocean, atmosphere, and land. We aggregate the detected shifts that are connected spatially or temporally. This results in connected regions of abrupt shifts and allows us to map areas that are most at risk of these shifts according to CMIP6 models. We report statistics on number of abrupt changes detected, surface area of abrupt changes, and critical global mean temperature at which these abrupt changes occur. This is done for various climate subsystems and potential tipping elements, such as the Arctic sea ice, Antarctic sea ice and the North Atlantic subpolar gyre. We find evidence for abrupt changes in several systems, but not all models show them equally.