Tracing the impacts of Mount Pinatubo eruption on global climate using spatially-varying changepoint detection

Abstract

Significant events such as volcanic eruptions can have global and long lasting impacts on climate. These global impacts, however, are not uniform across space and time. Understanding how the Mt. Pinatubo eruption affects global and regional climate is of great interest for predicting impact on climate due to similar events. We propose a Bayesian framework to simultaneously detect and estimate spatially-varying temporal changepoints for regional climate impacts. Our approach takes into account the diffusing nature of the changes caused by the volcanic eruption and leverages spatial correlation. We illustrate our method on simulated datasets and compare it with an existing changepoint detection method. Finally, we apply our method on monthly stratospheric aerosol optical depth and surface temperature data from 1985 to 1995 to detect and estimate changepoints following the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption.