SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2103.10936

Forecasting of Meteorological variables using statistical methods and tools

Abstract

The need to understand the role of statistical methods for the forecasting of climatological parameters cannot be trivialized. This study gives an in depth review on the different variations of the Mann-Kendall (M-K) trend test and how they can be applied, regression techniques (Simple and Multiple), the Angstrom-Prescott model for solar radiation, etc. The study then goes ahead to apply some of them with data obtained from the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), and applying tools like the python programming language and Wolfram Mathematica. Results show that the maximum ambient temperature for Calabar is increasing (Z=2.52) significantly after the calculated p-value < 0.05 (significant level). The seasonal M-K test was also applied for the dry and wet seasons and both were found to be increasing (Z=3.23 and Z=4.04 respectively) after their calculated p-values < 0.05. The relationship between refractivity and other meteorological parameters relating to it was discerned using partial differential equations giving the gradient of each with refractivity; this was compared with results from the correlation matrix to show that the water vapour contents of the atmosphere contributes significantly to the variation of refractivity. Multiple linear regression has also been adopted to give an accurate model for the prediction of refractivity in the region after the residual error between the calculated refractivity and predicted refractivity was minimal.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Emmanuel Agbo. 2021-02-20. Forecasting of Meteorological variables using statistical methods and tools. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.10936

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Windowed Envelope Statistics for Time-Domain Significant Wave Height Estimation From HF Radar

Significant wave height (SWH) retrieval from high-frequency (HF) radar typically relies on a weak second-order Doppler continuum that is sensitive to noise, interference, and spectral leakage. This letter presents a Windowed Envelope Statistics Estimator (WESE) that operates directly on beam-formed time-domain voltages. A second-order term obtained from a Neumann expansion of the rough-surface field equation motivates quadratic compensation of localized radar features. WESE extracts the mean, standard deviation, or variance from overlapping windows of the in-phase, quadrature, or envelope-magnitude sequence, followed by quadratic compensation, rank ordering, least-squares regression, and causal smoothing. Evaluation used 335 synchronized hourly observations from a 13.385 MHz, 12-element WERA system at Argentia, Newfoundland and Labrador. The optimal configuration used quadrature variance, a 16-sample window, 896 retained chronological samples, and 30-h smoothing, achieving an RMSE of 0.152 m and a Pearson correlation of 0.978. This represents RMSE reductions of 32.1% and 18.7% relative to previously reported linear and second-order compensated ordered-statistics models, respectively. The results demonstrate robust time-domain SWH estimation without explicit Doppler-spectrum construction.

physics.ao-ph

KiloDA: Reconstructing kilometer-scale near-surface wind states from sparse station observations

Accurate kilometer-scale near-surface winds are important for understanding atmospheric processes over complex terrain, yet remain difficult to reconstruct from sparse and unevenly distributed observations. Here we introduce KiloDA, a diffusion framework for hourly kilometer-scale wind reconstruction from surface stations. KiloDA learns the statistical distribution and spatial structure of wind fields from historical 3-km Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model forecasts. At each reconstruction time, no contemporaneous WRF field is used. Instead, station observations provide the only constraints on the current atmospheric state and guide posterior sampling from the learned prior. In idealized WRF experiments, KiloDA recovers localized wind structures when only 0.24% of grid cells are observed and shows an overall advantage over conventional interpolation across terrain conditions and wind speed regimes. This capability largely transfers to real observations. In a fully withheld region, KiloDA reduces the median wind speed root mean square error (RMSE) by 19% relative to ERA5 reanalysis, using only observations outside the region, with the largest improvements over high-elevation and high-relief terrain. A random station holdout further confirms that this advantage extends across different complex-terrain locations and holdout configurations. These results show that historical model archives can provide useful structural knowledge for reconstructing kilometer-scale wind fields from sparse observations without requiring an accurate model estimate of the current atmospheric state.

physics.ao-ph