Local sensitivity of spatiotemporal structures

We present an index for the local sensitivity of spatiotemporal structures in coupled oscillatory systems based on the properties of local-in-space, finite-time Lyapunov exponents. For a system of nonlocally coupled Rossler oscillators, we show that variations of this index for different oscillators reflect the sensitivity to noise and the onset of spatial chaos for the patterns where coherence and incoherence regions coexist.