Von Storch Navarra. Analysis of Climate Variability Applications of Statistical Techniques

Springer, 1999. — 356 p.This volume has grown from an Autumn School about "Analysis of Climate Variability - Applications of Statistical techniques" on Elba in November 1993. We have included those lectures which referred explicitly to applications of statistical techniques in climate science, since we felt that general descriptions of statistical methods, both at the introductory and at advanced level, are already available. We tried to stress the application side, discussing many examples dealing with the analysis of observed data and with the evaluation of model results (Parts I and II). Some effort is also devoted to the treatment of various techniques of pattern analysis (Part III). Methods like teleconnections, EOF, SSA, CCA and POP are becoming routine tools for the climate researcher and it is probably important for graduate students to be exposed to them early in their academic career in a hopefully clear and concise way.
A short subject index is included at the end of the volume to assist the reader in the search of selected topics. Rather than attempting to reference every possible occurrence of some topic we have preferred to indicate the page where that topic is more extensively discussed.
The Autumn School was part of the training and education activities of the European Programme on Climatology and Natural Hazards (EPOCH), and is continued under the subsequent research programme (ENVIRONMENT 1990-1994). It aimed at students in general, taking rst and second year courses at the graduate level. Since then, the idea of organizing week-long schools of this sort, with proceedings published by Springer Verlag, has ourished; one of the editors, Hans von Storch, has set up with his institution, the GKSS Research Centre in Germany, the "GKSS School on Environmental Research" which has dealt by now with "Anthropogenic Climate Change" and "Modelling in Environmental Research".
This collection of lectures created a signi cant response in the scienti c community, so that in late 1998 the 1st edition was out of stock, and the
publisher, Springer Verlag, offered us the publication of a second, revised edition.
It turned out that in spite of the impressive progress of climate sciences, the lectures of this volume were mostly up-to-date; several chapters were updated, in particular Chapters 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 13 to 15. For instance, recent developments with respect to detecting climate change are summarized in Chapter 4, an SVD based method for comparing observed and modeled data is presented in Chapter 12, the techniques of Redundancy Analysis and Empirical Orthogonal Teleconnections, and of Analysis-of-Variance are sketched in Chapter 13 and 8. Of course, the extensive literature list has been updated and extended, and ne tuning with formulation was made throughout the book for further improving the clarity.
Hans von Storch and Antonio Navarra, July 1999