climdex.pcic (version 1.0-3)

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-.

See Also

climdexInput.raw, climdexInput.csv, climdexInput-class.