AT 655: Objective Analysis in the Atmospheric Sciences

Instructor: Prof. Elizabeth A. Barnes
Email: eabarnes .at. atmos.colostate.edu
Office Hours: 2:00-3:00 T Th, or by appointment

TA: Chris Slocum
Email: cslocum .at. atmos.colostate.edu
Office Hours: 1:00-3:00 W, or by appointment

Department of
Atmospheric Science

Course Focus

The course provides an overview of the statistical methods used to interpret data sets in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences. This is a tools class: the objective is to provide a working knowledge of the statistical tools most commonly used in the literature. However, additional time will be spent on how to professionally and objectively present and review scientific results.

(top) p-values and confidence intervals of normally distributed data (middle) North Atlantic Oscillation pattern and PC time series obtained from EOF anlaysis (bottom) frequency-wavenumber power spectra of brightness temperature (Fig. 1a of Kiladis et al. (2009); Rev. Geophys.)

Lectures

M W F 10:00-10:50 AM ATS 101

General Topics Covered

• Basic statistics
• Monte Carlo techniques
• Regression methods
• Matrix methods: EOF, SVD, MCA and CCA
• Power spectra of time series
• Filtering of time series