ESTIMATION OF THE GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURE WITH POINT GAUGES Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • This paper considers the mean squared error (MSE) incurred in estimating an idealized earth's global average temperature with a finite number of point gauges located in a specified or stochastic way over the globe. For a class of model earths with rotationally invariant statistics, the MSE formula can be cast into the form of a summation over spherical harmonic indices. The summand factors into a part which depends on the design of the gauge network and a second part which is the degree variance spectrum of the surface temperature field. After presenting this formalism, we provide an example spectrum for the surface temperature field derived from a simple two parameter stochastic climate model defined on the sphere. An example calculation is given for the case of N gauges randomly arranged on the sphere. In addition, the sampling error is computed for some simple regular arrays of gauges as illustrative examples. Copyright 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

published proceedings

  • ENVIRONMETRICS

author list (cited authors)

  • NORTH, G. R., SHEN, S. S., & HARDIN, J. W.

citation count

  • 10

complete list of authors

  • NORTH, GR||SHEN, SS||HARDIN, JW

publication date

  • January 1992

publisher