Review of the proposal

Review of the proposal

Weekly periodicities in climatology by

Peter Barmet and Thomas Kuster

This proposal focuses on a highly debated and active topic and is suitable to be investigated with the time frame of a diploma thesis.

Generally I think that both the data as well as the approach is useful for this kind of investigation. I only see two issues in this proposal which are summarized below:

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On should be aware that dynamical effects characteristic for the alpine region (e.g. foehn, orographic precipitation, local valley circulations) could also affect parameters such as precip. or temperature differently than in regions where orography is less important. This could probably lead to autocorrelations in the data (e.g. pollutants which are transported within a valley in a specific direction etc.) or even to masking of specific effects.

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I think a major point that needs to be considered is the statistical approach one wants to make. In case of noisy data it is essential to use statistical methods which are “robust” and are not influenced by outlying

observations. Also the inferences such as statistical significance which are

usually made based on specific tests (e.g. t-tests) always assume that the

model error is normally distributed which in many cases is not fulfilled. One

should be aware of these statistical issues and think about it right from the

beginning of the work to make sure that trends or oscillations are really

reliably significant.