7,349 research outputs found
Algorithms for Estimating Trends in Global Temperature Volatility
Trends in terrestrial temperature variability are perhaps more relevant for
species viability than trends in mean temperature. In this paper, we develop
methodology for estimating such trends using multi-resolution climate data from
polar orbiting weather satellites. We derive two novel algorithms for
computation that are tailored for dense, gridded observations over both space
and time. We evaluate our methods with a simulation that mimics these data's
features and on a large, publicly available, global temperature dataset with
the eventual goal of tracking trends in cloud reflectance temperature
variability.Comment: Published in AAAI-1
On the spatio-temporal analysis of hydrological droughts from global hydrological models
The recent concerns for world-wide extreme events related to climate change have motivated the development of large scale models that simulate the global water cycle. In this context, analysis of hydrological extremes is important and requires the adaptation of identification methods used for river basin models. This paper presents two methodologies that extend the tools to analyze spatio-temporal drought development and characteristics using large scale gridded time series of hydrometeorological data. The methodologies are classified as non-contiguous and contiguous drought area analyses (i.e. NCDA and CDA). The NCDA presents time series of percentages of areas in drought at the global scale and for pre-defined regions of known hydroclimatology. The CDA is introduced as a complementary method that generates information on the spatial coherence of drought events at the global scale. Spatial drought events are found through CDA by clustering patterns (contiguous areas). In this study the global hydrological model WaterGAP was used to illustrate the methodology development. Global gridded time series of subsurface runoff (resolution 0.5°) simulated with the WaterGAP model from land points were used. The NCDA and CDA were developed to identify drought events in runoff. The percentages of area in drought calculated with both methods show complementary information on the spatial and temporal events for the last decades of the 20th century. The NCDA provides relevant information on the average number of droughts, duration and severity (deficit volume) for pre-defined regions (globe, 2 selected hydroclimatic regions). Additionally, the CDA provides information on the number of spatially linked areas in drought, maximum spatial event and their geographic location on the globe. Some results capture the overall spatio-temporal drought extremes over the last decades of the 20th century. Events like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in South America and the pan-European drought in 1976 appeared clearly in both analyses. The methodologies introduced provide an important basis for the global characterization of droughts, model inter-comparison of drought identified from global hydrological models and spatial event analyse
Bayesian approach to Spatio-temporally Consistent Simulation of Daily Monsoon Rainfall over India
Simulation of rainfall over a region for long time-sequences can be very
useful for planning and policy-making, especially in India where the economy is
heavily reliant on monsoon rainfall. However, such simulations should be able
to preserve the known spatial and temporal characteristics of rainfall over
India. General Circulation Models (GCMs) are unable to do so, and various
rainfall generators designed by hydrologists using stochastic processes like
Gaussian Processes are also difficult to apply over the vast and highly diverse
landscape of India. In this paper, we explore a series of Bayesian models based
on conditional distributions of latent variables that describe weather
conditions at specific locations and over the whole country. During parameter
estimation from observed data, we use spatio-temporal smoothing using Markov
Random Field so that the parameters learnt are spatially and temporally
coherent. Also, we use a nonparametric spatial clustering based on Chinese
Restaurant Process to identify homogeneous regions, which are utilized by some
of the proposed models to improve spatial correlations of the simulated
rainfall. The models are able to simulate daily rainfall across India for
years, and can also utilize contextual information for conditional simulation.
We use two datasets of different spatial resolutions over India, and focus on
the period 2000-2015. We propose a large number of metrics to study the
spatio-temporal properties of the simulations by the models, and compare them
with the observed data to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the models
An Extended Laplace Approximation Method for Bayesian Inference of Self-Exciting Spatial-Temporal Models of Count Data
Self-Exciting models are statistical models of count data where the
probability of an event occurring is influenced by the history of the process.
In particular, self-exciting spatio-temporal models allow for spatial
dependence as well as temporal self-excitation. For large spatial or temporal
regions, however, the model leads to an intractable likelihood. An increasingly
common method for dealing with large spatio-temporal models is by using Laplace
approximations (LA). This method is convenient as it can easily be applied and
is quickly implemented. However, as we will demonstrate in this manuscript,
when applied to self-exciting Poisson spatial-temporal models, Laplace
Approximations result in a significant bias in estimating some parameters. Due
to this bias, we propose using up to sixth-order corrections to the LA for
fitting these models. We will demonstrate how to do this in a Bayesian setting
for Self-Exciting Spatio-Temporal models. We will further show there is a
limited parameter space where the extended LA method still has bias. In these
uncommon instances we will demonstrate how a more computationally intensive
fully Bayesian approach using the Stan software program is possible in those
rare instances. The performance of the extended LA method is illustrated with
both simulation and real-world data
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