climdex.pcic: climdex.pcic, an implementation of the ETCCDI climate change indices.
Description
This package implements the ETCCDI's 27 core climate change indices
efficiently in R.Details
The calculation of climate extremes are important in many
disciplines. Annual maximum daily precipitation, annual maximum wind
speed, and other such extremes are used in many engineering
applications. However, they are not as useful when speaking about
climate change.
The Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indicies (ETCCDI)
has created a set of 27 core indices with the intent of
capturing the change in the extremes of climate and in selected
parameters deemed relevant to other disciplines. These model the
following types of parameters:
- Shifts in the number of days where comparatively extreme
conditions are observed.
- Growing season length.
- 10th and 90th percentiles of temperature versus baseline
conditions.
- Lengths of warm, cold, wet, and dry spells.
- Counts of days where precipitation exceeds a threshold.
- Total precipitation where precipitation exceeds the 95th or
99th percentile of the baseline.
The climdex.pcic package provides an implementation of the
ETCCDI's 27 core climate change indices. It aims to be reasonably high
performance, to handle non-Gregorian calendar types, to be as correct
as possible given the definitions of the indices, and to have
sufficiently readable and concise code as to facilitate easy
verification by inspection.References
http://cccma.seos.uvic.ca/ETCCDMI/list_27_indices.shtml
Karl, T.R., N. Nicholls, and A. Ghazi, 1999: CLIVAR/GCOS/WMO
workshop on indices and indicators for climate extremes: Workshop
summary. Climatic Change, 42, 3-7.
Peterson, T.C., and Coauthors: Report on the Activities of the
Working Group on Climate Change Detection and Related
Rapporteurs 1998-2001. WMO, Rep. WCDMP-47, WMO-TD 1071, Geneve,
Switzerland, 143pp.
Zhang, X., 2005: Avoiding inhomogeneity in percentile-based indices of
temperature extremes. Journal of Climate 18.11 (2005):1641-.