Remote sensing observations, products and simulations are fundamental sources of information to monitor our planet and its climate variability. Uncovering the main modes of spatial and temporal variability in Earth data is essential to analyze and understand the underlying physical dynamics and processes driving the Earth System. Dimensionality reduction methods can work with spatiotemporal datasets and decompose the information efficiently. Principal Component Analysis (PCA), also known as Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOF) in geophysics, has been traditionally used to analyze climatic data. However, when nonlinear feature relations are present, PCA/EOF fails. In this work, we propose a nonlinear PCA method to deal with spatio-temporal Earth System data. The proposed method, called Rotated Complex Kernel PCA (ROCK-PCA for short), works in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces to account for nonlinear processes, operates in the complex kernel domain to account for both space and time features, and adds an extra rotation for improved flexibility. The result is an explicitly resolved spatio-temporal decomposition of the Earth data cube. The method is unsupervised and computationally very efficient. We illustrate its ability to uncover spatio-temporal patterns using synthetic experiments and real data. Results of the decomposition of three essential climate variables are shown: satellite-based global Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) and Soil Moisture (SM), and reanalysis Sea Surface Temperature (SST) data. The ROCK-PCA method allows identifying their annual and seasonal oscillations, as well as their non-seasonal trends and spatial variability patterns. The main modes of variability of GPP and SM match expected distributions of land-cover and eco-hydrological zones, respectively; the inter-annual component of SM is shown to be highly correlated with El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon; and the SST annual oscillation is perfectly uncoupled in magnitude and phase from the global warming trend and ENSO anomalies, as well as from their mutual interactions. We provide a working source code of the presented method for the interested reader in https://github.com/DiegoBueso/ROCK-PCA.

Environmental change is a consequence of many interrelated factors. How vegetation responds to natural and human activity still needs to be well established, quantified, and understood. Recent satellite missions providing hydrologic and ecological indicators enable better monitoring of Earth system changes, yet there is no automatic way to address this issue directly from observations. Here, we develop an observation-based methodology to capture evidence of changes in global terrestrial ecosystems and attribute these changes to natural or anthropogenic activity. We use the longest time record of global microwave L-band soil moisture (SM) and vegetation optical depth (VOD) as satellite data and build spatially-explicit maps of change in soil and vegetation water content and biomass reflecting large ecosystem changes during the last decade, 2010-2020. Regions of prominent trends (from -8% to 9% per year) are observed, especially in humid and semi-arid climates. We further combine such trends with land cover change maps, vegetation greenness, and precipitation variability to assess their relationship with major documented ecosystem changes. Several regions emerge from our results. They cluster changes according to human activity drivers, including deforestation (Amazon, Central Africa) and wildfires (East Australia), artificial reforestation (South-East China), abandonment of farm fields (Central Russia), and climate shifts related to changes in precipitation variability (East Africa, North America, and Central Argentina). Using the high sensitivity of soil and vegetation water content to ecosystem changes, microwave satellite observations enable us to quantify and attribute global vegetation responses to climate or anthropogenic activities as a direct measure of environmental changes and the mechanisms driving them.

Soil moisture (SM) is a key state variable of the hydrological cycle, needed to monitor the effects of a changing climate on natural resources. Soil moisture is highly variable in space and time, presenting seasonalities, anomalies and long-term trends, but also, and important nonlinear behaviours. Here, we introduce a novel fast and nonlinear complex PCA method to analyze the spatio-temporal patterns of the Earth's surface SM. We use global SM estimates acquired during the period 2010-2017 by ESA's SMOS mission. Our approach unveils both time and space modes, trends and periodicities unlike standard PCA decompositions. Results show the distribution of the total SM variance among its different components, and indicate the dominant modes of temporal variability in surface soil moisture for different regions. The relationship of the derived SM spatio-temporal patterns with El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions is also explored.

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