The Ancien Régime instrumental meteorological observations in Belgium, or the physician with lancet and thermometer in the wake of Hippocrates

The paper unravels the close connection that, from the end of the 17th century until well into the 19th century, brought together meteorologists and physicians into one common programme. This connection was based upon the works of the Greek physician Hippocrates, and particularly "Airs, Waters, and Places". The ancient doctrine underwent a strong revival in the 18th century and formed the basis of the founding of the "Societe Royale de Medecine" in Paris. This society, under the direct guidance of the French govermnent, launched a nationwide medicometeorological enquiry. Its goal was to find the relationship between health, weather, climate and also the environment in order to understand the appearance and spread of illnesses, particularly the epidemics and epizootics. The meteorological observations carried out by the physicians in the framework of the neo-hippocratic hypothesis form the cornerstones of the early meteorological observations in Belgium. Their importance in Global Change is highlighted because of their use in the climate reconstruction over the last hundreds of years

Monthly sunspot number time series analysis and its modeling through autoregressive artificial neural network

This study reports a statistical analysis of monthly sunspot number time series and observes non homogeneity and asymmetry within it. Using Mann-Kendall test a linear trend is revealed. After identifying stationarity within the time series we generate autoregressive AR(p) and autoregressive moving average (ARMA(p,q)). Based on minimization of AIC we find 3 and 1 as the best values of p and q respectively. In the next phase, autoregressive neural network (AR-NN(3)) is generated by training a generalized feedforward neural network (GFNN). Assessing the model performances by means of Willmott's index of second order and coefficient of determination, the performance of AR-NN(3) is identified to be better than AR(3) and ARMA(3,1).Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure