THE AUTOREGRESSIVE MODEL OF CLIMATOLOGICAL TIME SERIES: AN APPLICATION TO THE LONGEST TIME SERIES IN PORTUGAL
S. M. Leite, José Pinto Peixoto · International Journal of Climatology · 1996
The autoregressive model is extremely useful for the representation of many geophysical time series. The present paper deals, in the first place, with the analysis of sets of meteorological observations (temperature and precipitation) made sequentially in time, from 1856 to 1994, at equidistant time intervals Δt = 1 year. The best fitting is an autoregressive model of order 45. A thorough discussion of the temperature observation time series is presented, showing two main salient features: an approximately 0ċ6°C secular trend during the past century and a definite warming in the 1980s and early 1990s. The estimated values of temperature and precipitation are compared with the observed data series.