Saturday, March 23, 2013

A new (to me) climate data idea.


As I have stated earlier, the effects of the warming and cooling of vast regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans near the equator are a very big part of climate in a large area of the world.  Any northern Californian who pays attention to weather has heard about La Niña and El Niño as the cause of dry or wet years and we are near the middle of the Norther Temperate zone.

The messy chart presented here, which can be clicked on to show a larger version, shows the effect of the ocean temperatures from 1955 to 2010 through all four seasons each year, as seasons are counted in the northern hemisphere. The thick blue line with empty squares as the markers show the Winter variance from normal, just as green dotted line (circles) shows Spring, the line red line with Xs shows Summer and the thin orange line with diamonds shows Fall.

The idea is to look at regions with this data factored out to see if the pattern gets less variable. We will test "less variability" both visually and with the R² variable from statistics, which shows how much a data set wanders from a regression line.  My first test cases will be tropical India, which we would expect will become much less variable being so close to the weather anomaly, and Greenland, which is far from the equator and not bordering the Indian or Pacific Oceans at all.

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