Early warnings of the transition to a superrotating atmospheric state Several general circulation models (GCMs) have showed bifurcations of their atmospheric state under a broad range of warm climates. These include some of the more extreme global warming scenarios. This bifurcation can cause the transition to a superrotating state, a state where its angular momentum exceeds the solid body rotation of the planet. Here we use an idealized GCM to simulate this transition by altering a single non-dimensional control parameter, the thermal Rossby number. For a bifurcation induced transition there is potential for early warnings and we look for these here. Typically used early warning indicators, variance and lag 1 autocorrelation, calculated for the mean zonal equatorial wind speed, increase and peak just before the transition. The full autocorrelation function taken at multiple lags is also oscillatory, with a period of 25 days preceding the transition. This oscillatory behaviour is reminiscent of a Hopf bifurcation. Motivated by this extra structure, we use a generalised early warning vector technique to diagnose the dominant spatial modes of the horizontal windfield fluctuations. We find a zonal wavenumber zero pattern we call the `precursor' mode, that appears shortly before and disappears soon after the transition. We attribute the increase in the early warning indicators to this spatial precursor mode.