A Measure of Winter Severity

Abstract

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A Stochastic Model of Temperature Variations at Weather Stations in Britain

“…Note that the straddle rule (Lyness and Badger, 1970) was not employed for calculating any of the degree-day statistics and hence the figures are not comparable with those quoted by Lyness and Badger.…”

“…Cube-root/normal scales have been employed in preference to the log/normal scales used by Lyness and Badger (1970) because the former give equally good straight line representations of positive values and (unlike the log/normal) also allow zero values of degree-days to be plotted. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (Keeping, 1962) allows (with 95 per cent confidence) a maximum absolute deviation of up to 28 on the "percentiles" scale and hence, despite appearances, neither of these Bradford models differs significantly from the recorded observations.…”

“…A good deal can be done by condensing such large amounts of data into carefully chosen measures and fitting appropriate statistical distributions. A good description of this sort of work and its planning background is given by Lyness and Badger (1970). However, planning problems associated with the matching of supply and demand for gas are often exceedingly complex.…”

The spatiotemporal variations of winter severity over North America

“…Some studies focus on the extreme events, including precipitation extremes such as storms (Changnon et al ., 2008) and blizzard (Schwartz and Schmidlin, 2002), and temperature extremes, like cold air outbreak (Vavrus et al ., 2006). On the other hand, some studies focused on the climatology of winter, such as the temperature accumulation (Lyness and Badger, 1970). While these indices have been successfully to some extent applied for specific purposes in specific regions, they may not be applicable in other climate regimes.…”