NCAR's Geophysical Statistics Project

Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences

We are primarily writing packages under the R language for statistical computing. R is open source, available on many platforms, widely supported, and (usually) easily installed or built. There are a large number of user-contributed packages for R that are trivially installed. This quote is shamelessly pirated from the R Project Homepage:



Fields

A suite of functions focused on the analysis of spatial data including large data sets and nonstationary covariance models and simulation. The major methods implemented include cubic and thin plate splines, universal Kriging and Kriging for large data sets. The main feature is that any covariance function implemented in R,S can be used for spatial prediction. Includes help files.

KriSp

Functions for interpolation of large datasets using covariance tapering.

RadioSonde

Functions to create SKEW-T,log p plots and wind profiles for radiosonde data.

extRemes

The extRemes Toolkit is an interactive program for analyzing extreme value data using the R statistical programming language. A graphical user interface is provided, so a knowledge of R is not necessarily required. The toolkit comes with a tutorial that explains how the toolkit can be used to treat weather and climate extremes in a realistic manner (e.g., taking into account diurnal and annual cycles, trends, physically-based covariates).

Snackbar

A few miscellaneous routines for reading Fortran (, C) direct-access binary, Fortran unformatted ("flat") files, world peace, that sort of thing.

R netCDF examples

netCDF is a common, self-describing, portable, binary format for geophysical data. GSP made an executive decision (i.e. Tim and Doug talked at lunch) to use this format as much as possible when creating or manipulating data sets. For the statistical readership we note that there are contributed packages for R that allow for the efficient reading and writing of netCDF files and part of the intent of our examples page is to provide some simple examples to get users started.

laptop + LaTeX ==> Presentation

For those of you who can't quite bring themselves to use Powerpoint® and the MS equation editor! Steps to create a pdf file from LaTeX with several public-domain tools. The tool we use most is pdflatex part of the standard Latex/Tex/PcTeX distribution which facilitates the creation of a pdf output file and supports full-screen images easily presented using the Acrobat reader. Includes an example talk incorporating ps, pdf and jpeg figures and hyperlinks back and forth throughout the document.

DISCLAIMER:

This is software for statistical research and not for commercial uses. The authors do not guarantee the correctness of any function or program in these packages. Any changes to the software should not be made without the authors permission.

Suggestions always welcome - thoar 'at' ucar 'dot' edu