Early warning signals of tipping points in periodically forced systems.

The prospect of finding generic early warning signals of an approaching tipping point in a complex system has generated much recent interest. Existing methods are predicated on a separation of timescales between the system studied and its forcing. However, many systems, including several candidate tipping elements in the climate system, are forced periodically at a timescale comparable to their internal dynamics. Here we find alternative early warning signals of tipping points due to local bifurcations in systems subjected to periodic forcing whose time scale is similar to the period of the forcing. These systems are not in, or close to, a fixed point. Instead their steady state is described by a periodic attractor. We show that the phase lag and amplification of the system response provide early warning signals, based on a linear dynamics approximation. Furthermore, the power spectrum of the system's time series reveals the generation of harmonics of the forcing period, the size of which are proportional to how nonlinear the system's response is becoming with nonlinear effects becoming more prominent closer to a bifurcation. We apply these indicators to a simple conceptual system and satellite observations of Arctic sea ice area, the latter conjectured to have a bifurcation type tipping point. We find no detectable signal of the Arctic sea ice approaching a local bifurcation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]