Spatial Early Warning Signals for Rapidly Forced Systems

Climate Change is forcing Earth System tipping elements rapidly, in some cases this forcing occurs on a similar timescale to the intrinsic timescale of the tipping element itself. This poses challenges for our ability to get good early warning signals for these tipping elements, as typical approaches require a clear timescale separation between the assumed slow forcing and the timescale of the system. We demonstrate that by calculating early warning signals ‘over space’ instead of ‘over time’ better early warning signals can be obtained for faster forcing. We compare the relative merits of these two ways of calculating early warning signals.