Giulio Tirabassi defends his PhD thesis on July 5th, 2015 "Disentangling Climatic Interactions and Detecting Tipping Points by Means of Complex Networks"

Abstract: Network theory is a powerful tool to investigate complex systems, which are systems composed by a large number of interacting sub-components. Being this a very general concept, it is not surprising that network theory has been successfully applied in very different fields such as sociology, biology, epidemics, geophysics, etc. In particular, this thesis focuses in the construction climate networks, i. e. networks in which the nodes are geographical locations on Earth and the links indicate inter-relations among them. The links were computed from various statistical similarity measures of a climatological variable (such as the surface air temperature) at different geographical locations. The approach is very general and, depending on the statistical similarity measure employed, allows investigating different aspects of the Earth climate dynamics. The thesis was developed within the EU funded LINC project (climatelinc.eu)