Modeling Temperature Data: An Illustration of the Use of Biplots in Nonlinear Modeling

Abstract

A strategy for exploring multivariate data and modeling is presented and illustrated on meteorological data. Its principal tool is the biplot two-dimensional display of data matrices and its three-dimensional analog. Application to temperature data is shown to lead to a nonlinear harmonic model which fits the data closely and has parameters with obvious physical interpretations. This may be useful for extrapolation in time as originally proposed by Brier and Meltesen, who previously analyzed these data. The strategy proposed in this paper has wide applications to multivariate data and could well be used by meteorologists for data exploration and for diagnosing models (not necessarily of the particular form used here) that would closely fit their data.