ATMO 632: Statistical Methods in Climate Research

Advanced statistical techniques for analysis and modeling of climate variability; time series and regression, Bayesian methods, spectral analysis, stochastic processes, statistical forecasting and predictability, empirical orthogonal functions, signal detection; applications to real data and model simulations

Contact Information

E-mail: svn (at)ucar.edu
Phone: 5-2306 (Texas A&M)
Office: O&M Building, Room 611 (Texas A&M)

Home Page at NCAR

Resources

  • Course Syllabus and Links to Course Notes etc.
  • Week1: Review of Probability and Statistics
  • Week2: Regression, Principal Component Analysis
  • Week3: Spectral Analysis
  • Week4: Spectral Peaks, Monte Carlo methods
  • Week5: Wavelets, Bayesian Inference
  • Week6: Predictability and Forecasting
  • Week7: Predictability, Potential Predictability, and Information Theory
  • Week8: Presentations
  • Week9: Predictability, Information Theory, Correlations, Causality

    • Observational Datasets

  • North Atlantic Oscillation winter (Dec-Mar) time series data from 1864-2003 (text file with two columns: year of January, NAO index). The NAO index is computed as the difference of normalized sea level pressure between Lisbon, Portugal and Stykkisholmur/Reykjavik, Iceland.
    [obtained from Jim Hurrell's web site]

  • NINO3 winter (Dec-Feb) time series data from 1951 to 2003 (text file with two columns: year of January, NINO3 index value in degrees Centigrade). The NINO3 index is computed as the average of sea surface temperature in the region (150W-90W, 5S-5N).
    [obtained from NOAA/CDC]

  • Tropical Pacific winter (Dec-Feb) average sea surface temperature (SST) data for the spatial domain (160E-90W, 12.5S-12.5N) for the 50 year period 1951 to 2000, where 1951 refers to year of the January in the winter of 1950-51 and so on. The spatial grid size is 40x10, with 40 equally spaced longitude values from 160E to 90W and 10 equally spaced latitude values from 12.5S to 12.5N. The data is available as a plain text file containing 10 SST values per line (in degrees C), with each set of four lines corresponding to the 40 longitudinal values (=> forty lines correspond to data for each year, latitude values ordered from south to north). There are 2000 lines of data in the file, corresponding to 50 years of SST data, starting from 1951.

    • last modified on 8/30/2004.