Report on the Ocean/Atmosphere Time Series Analysis course

The “Ocean/Atmosphere Time Series Analysis: Theory and Practice” course took place during the two weeks of 15-26. October, 2018. The course was taught by oceanographer Jonathan Lilly (Theiss Research, La Jolla, California), and held at the Alfred-Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. Among the 24 participants, we were three CHESS students joining the course.

A typical day ran from 10 AM until roughly 3 PM, and consisted of about two hours of lectures and two hours of labs, followed by homework assignments for the evening. Descriptive statistics, filtering, multi-taper spectral analysis, wavelet analysis, and stochastic modeling were among the topics covered in the lectures, and tested out during the many practical sessions. For inspiration and reflection, Jonathan additionally offered a session each day of philosophical insights from his research career this far.

As students, we were encouraged to bring our own data to the course in order to practice applying the statistical tools from the lectures, and making potential strides in our own research. As a final report, we created a Matlab Live Script demonstrating the application of each analysis method to our own dataset. Concluding a successful two weeks, we held a ‘virtual poster session’ on our final day, giving each other feedback and discussing our respective results.

Text: Helene Asbjørnsen     Photo: Claudia Hanfland