Talk
Boase Hydrologic Sciences and Water Resources Engineering Seminar Series
When
· 11:15 AM MDT
Shown in the venue’s time zone (America/Denver), not yours.
Where
Boulder, CO
Tickets
No on-sale date recorded
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What the source said
Speaker: Nishant Malik, Associate Professor, Mathematics and Statistics, Rochester Institute of Technology and Visiting Fellow, CIRES Seminar Title: Higher-Order Interactions and the Evolving Organization of Earth's Climate System Abstract: Climate network analysis is a powerful, versatile framework for modeling and analyzing spatiotemporal climate datasets and the physical processes underpinning teleconnections. However, conventional climate network analysis primarily focuses on dyadic relationships, overlooking the multi-way, higher-order organizational structures inherent in the climate system. This talk bridges this gap by integrating topological data analysis with climate network analysis to characterize higher-order interactions and track their evolution over the past eight decades. By evaluating correlations among global temperature anomaly time series, we construct simplicial complexes and quantify their temporal dynamics using topological invariants, including Betti numbers, the Euler characteristic, and curvature. Using persistent homology, we trace the birth and death of multi-scale topological features such as connected components and 1D loops. Our findings reveal coherent curvature patterns and dynamic Euler characteristics that delineate distinct climate regimes, highlighting the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) as a primary driver of decadal teleconnections. Furthermore, the analysis uncovers a shifting preference toward shorter-scale connections, reflecting potential impacts of long-term climate change and localized phenomena such as ENSO. Ultimately, this work demonstrates how tools from algebraic topology and topological graph theory can reveal hidden, complex organization within Earth’s climate. Bio: Nishant Malik is an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), New York. He earned his Ph.D. from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, under the supervision of renowned mathematical physicist Jürgen Kurths. In recognition of his doctoral research, he received the Carl Ramsauer Prize from the Physical Society of Berlin. Prior to joining RIT, he held postdoctoral positions at Dartmouth College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the data-driven analysis and modeling of complex systems, with an emphasis on developing methods that reveal structure, dynamics, and emergent behavior in high-dimensional systems. His work draws on network science, nonlinear and stochastic dynamical systems, applied statistics, and related areas of computational mathematics. He is particularly interested in developing data-driven approaches to interdisciplinary problems arising across the natural and social sciences. Nishant is currently a visiting researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder on a sabbatical fellowship.