Hover a region to highlight its teleconnections · Drag threshold to filter weak links
Regions thousands of miles apart — moving in 97.7% sync · NASA MODIS LST · 12 biome regions · 2023 · ▶ Video Walkthrough
The Siberian taiga and Sahara desert are separated by thousands of miles, however in 2023, their surface temperatures rose and fell in almost complete sync. This is a result of a phenomenon called teleconnections. Teleconnections are a link between two distant regions' climates, caused by large-scale atmospheric waves, despite their geographic distance.
Teleconnections can shape weather patterns, which affect billions of people. Therefore, understanding this pattern and the regions which have linked climates can help us to predict droughts, heatwaves, and seasonal anomalies weeks or even months in advance, because if we know how one region's climate is behaving, we can forecast how their linked one will be as well.
In our project below, we visualize these linked regions using NASA satellite temperature data across 12 biome regions in 2023. Scroll down to explore raw temperature changes in each region, then see how these changes reflect a global network of interconnected regions.
These synchronized patterns form a global network of teleconnections. Explore which biomes are most strongly linked, and how those links shift across seasons.
On first glance, two regions like a frozen Siberian forest and a blistering desert like the Sahara should have no commonalities in temperature. However, in 2023 we saw that their surface temperatures moved in 97.7% sync (as determined by their Pearson correlation score - a calculated score where -1 means the regions move in complete opposition and +1 means they move in perfect unison). This phenomenon carries across multiple regions in the northern hemisphere, with Siberia and the Great Plains scoring a 96.3%, and the Arctic and Mediterranean moving together in 90.9% sync. These aren't neighboring regions, yet their temperatures rise and fall almost identically across 2023.
While the correlation scores can quantify how the regions’ temperatures are linked, the network graph allows you to see the overall connectivity across the globe. Through an exploration of the above visualizations, we can determine which regions are linked closely, which are outliers, and how the entire interconnected system changes when the seasons change. Observing patterns like these is what allows scientists to prepare for climate events and anomalies across the globe. Being able to visualize them as an interconnected network rather than a table of numbers emphasizes just how intertwined Earth’s climate really is. If you can read one region, you can forecast the world.