[Statlist] Séminaire Institut de Statistique Neuchâtel le 13 novembre 2007

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Séminaire de Statistique 
Institut de Statistique, Université de Neuchâtel 
Pierre à Mazel 7 (1er étage,salle 110), Neuchâtel,
http://www2.unine.ch/statistics
Mardi 13 novembre 2007, 11h00
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Professor Hans Rudolf Künsch, Department of Mathematics, ETH Zürich
 
Title "Statistics in climate research: Two examples"
 
Deterministic models are predominant in climate research because they represent knowledge about physical processes and because the parameters have a clear physical interpretation.  However, it is clear that measurement errors are not the only source of uncertainty and statistics can and should play a bigger role to assess these different sources of uncertainty within the framework of deterministic models. One approach is to reduce and quantify uncertainty by combining the outputs from different models. I will illustrate this with an example from regional climate predictions. It turns out that the crucial issue are the assumptions about the prediction biases.  A different approach is based on the technique of time-varying inputs or parameters to diagnose deficits of deterministic models. This will be illustrated by a simple hemispherically averaged energy balance model for global climate.