Scientific descriptions of the climate have traditionally been based on the study of average meteorological values taken from different positions around the world. In recent years however it has become apparent that these averages should be considered with other statistics that ultimately characterize spatial and temporal variability. This book is designed to meet that need. It is based on a course in computational statistics taught by the author that arose from a variety of projects on the design and development of software for the study of climate change, using statistics and methods of random functions.
This book combines theoretical underpinnings of statistics with practical analysis of Earth sciences data using MATLAB. Supplementary resources are available online.
Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences, Third Edition, explains the latest statistical methods used to describe, analyze, test, and forecast atmospheric data. This revised and expanded text is intended to help students understand and communicate what their data sets have to say, or to make sense of the scientific literature in meteorology, climatology, and related disciplines. In this new edition, what was a single chapter on multivariate statistics has been expanded to a full six chapters on this important topic. Other chapters have also been revised and cover exploratory data analysis, probability distributions, hypothesis testing, statistical weather forecasting, forecast verification, and time series analysis. There is now an expanded treatment of resampling tests and key analysis techniques, an updated discussion on ensemble forecasting, and a detailed chapter on forecast verification. In addition, the book includes new sections on maximum likelihood and on statistical simulation and contains current references to original research. Students will benefit from pedagogical features including worked examples, end-of-chapter exercises with separate solutions, and numerous illustrations and equations. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the atmospheric sciences, including meteorology, climatology, and other geophysical disciplines. - Accessible presentation and explanation of techniques for atmospheric data summarization, analysis, testing and forecasting - Many worked examples - End-of-chapter exercises, with answers provided
Mathematics and Climate is a timely textbook aimed at students and researchers in mathematics and statistics who are interested in current issues of climate science, as well as at climate scientists who wish to become familiar with qualitative and quantitative methods of mathematics and statistics. The authors emphasize conceptual models that capture important aspects of Earth's climate system and present the mathematical and statistical techniques that can be applied to their analysis. Topics from climate science include the Earth?s energy balance, temperature distribution, ocean circulation patterns such as El Ni?o?Southern Oscillation, ice caps and glaciation periods, the carbon cycle, and the biological pump. Among the mathematical and statistical techniques presented in the text are dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, Fourier analysis, conservation laws, regression analysis, and extreme value theory. The following features make Mathematics and Climate a valuable teaching resource: issues of current interest in climate science and sustainability are used to introduce the student to the methods of mathematics and statistics; the mathematical sophistication increases as the book progresses and topics can thus be selected according to interest and level of knowledge; each chapter ends with a set of exercises that reinforce or enhance the material presented in the chapter and stimulate critical thinking and communication skills; and the book contains an extensive list of references to the literature, a glossary of terms for the nontechnical reader, and a detailed index.
Synoptic and Dynamic Climatology provides the first comprehensive account of the dynamical behaviour and mechanisms of the global climate system and its components, together with a modern survey of synoptic-scale weather systems in the tropics and extratropics, and of the methods and applications of synoptic climate classification. It is unrivalled in the scope and detail of its contents. The work is thoroughly up to date, with extensive bibliographies by chapter. It is illustrated with nearly 300 figures and plates. *Part 1 provides an introduction to the global climate system and the space-time scales of weather and climate processes, followed by a chapter on climate data and their analysis *Part 2 describes and explains the characteristics of the general circulation of the global atmosphere and includes the nature and causes of global teleconnection patterns *Part 3 discusses synoptic weather systems in the extratropics and tropics and satellite-based climatologies of synoptic features. It also describes the applications of synoptic climatology and summarises current climatic research and its directions.
Climate is a paradigm of a complex system. Analysing climate data is an exciting challenge, which is increased by non-normal distributional shape, serial dependence, uneven spacing and timescale uncertainties. This book presents bootstrap resampling as a computing-intensive method able to meet the challenge. It shows the bootstrap to perform reliably in the most important statistical estimation techniques: regression, spectral analysis, extreme values and correlation. This book is written for climatologists and applied statisticians. It explains step by step the bootstrap algorithms (including novel adaptions) and methods for confidence interval construction. It tests the accuracy of the algorithms by means of Monte Carlo experiments. It analyses a large array of climate time series, giving a detailed account on the data and the associated climatological questions. This makes the book self-contained for graduate students and researchers.
Winner of the 2013 DeGroot Prize. A state-of-the-art presentation of spatio-temporal processes, bridging classic ideas with modern hierarchical statistical modeling concepts and the latest computational methods Noel Cressie and Christopher K. Wikle, are also winners of the 2011 PROSE Award in the Mathematics category, for the book “Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data” (2011), published by John Wiley and Sons. (The PROSE awards, for Professional and Scholarly Excellence, are given by the Association of American Publishers, the national trade association of the US book publishing industry.) Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data has now been reprinted with small corrections to the text and the bibliography. The overall content and pagination of the new printing remains the same; the difference comes in the form of corrections to typographical errors, editing of incomplete and missing references, and some updated spatio-temporal interpretations. From understanding environmental processes and climate trends to developing new technologies for mapping public-health data and the spread of invasive-species, there is a high demand for statistical analyses of data that take spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal information into account. Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data presents a systematic approach to key quantitative techniques that incorporate the latest advances in statistical computing as well as hierarchical, particularly Bayesian, statistical modeling, with an emphasis on dynamical spatio-temporal models. Cressie and Wikle supply a unique presentation that incorporates ideas from the areas of time series and spatial statistics as well as stochastic processes. Beginning with separate treatments of temporal data and spatial data, the book combines these concepts to discuss spatio-temporal statistical methods for understanding complex processes. Topics of coverage include: Exploratory methods for spatio-temporal data, including visualization, spectral analysis, empirical orthogonal function analysis, and LISAs Spatio-temporal covariance functions, spatio-temporal kriging, and time series of spatial processes Development of hierarchical dynamical spatio-temporal models (DSTMs), with discussion of linear and nonlinear DSTMs and computational algorithms for their implementation Quantifying and exploring spatio-temporal variability in scientific applications, including case studies based on real-world environmental data Throughout the book, interesting applications demonstrate the relevance of the presented concepts. Vivid, full-color graphics emphasize the visual nature of the topic, and a related FTP site contains supplementary material. Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data is an excellent book for a graduate-level course on spatio-temporal statistics. It is also a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in the fields of applied mathematics, engineering, and the environmental and health sciences.
Empirical-statistical downscaling (ESD) is a method for estimating how local climatic variables are affected by large-scale climatic conditions. ESD has been applied to local climate/weather studies for years, but there are few ? if any ? textbooks on the subject. It is also anticipated that ESD will become more important and commonplace in the future, as anthropogenic global warming proceeds. Thus, a textbook on ESD will be important for next-generation climate scientists.
