CLIMATIC NORMALS AS PREDICTORS. PART 3. MEDIAN VS. MEAN

Abstract

Rainfall and other variables with similarly skewed distributions are hard to characterize climatically due to their extreme variability. The arithmetic mean, generally used, is greatly influenced by extreme values. For rainfall data from 219 stations located in the western United States, the median was found to be a more representative value, and somewhat better than the mean for predicting future rainfall amounts. Some monthly precipitation frequency distributions are so greatly skewed that values smaller than the mean occur 90% of the time. Because any single measure of central tendency is inconclusive, measures of absolute and relative variability are summarized. Maps of percentage occurrence of the mean, ratio between median and mean, coefficient of variation (CV), and relative variability (Vq) are presented for the mid-season months--Jan, Apr, Jul, and Oct.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1968
Accession Number
AD0672268

Entities

People

  • William F. Slusser

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Air Force
  • California
  • Coefficients
  • Commerce
  • Computer Programs
  • Contracts
  • Dispersions
  • Frequency
  • Geography
  • Numerical Analysis
  • Precipitation
  • Regression Analysis
  • Skewness
  • Statistical Analysis
  • Statistics
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science/Meteorology
  • Regression Analysis.