Churd's work page

Work-related stuff

This page contains various bits and bobs related to my work life - mainly computer software, data sets, lecture notes from presentations and short courses, and publications. Most of my research is in the area of stochastic processes and time series, with specific applications in hydrology and climate modelling. Our research group produces quite a lot of software, mostly relating to fitting and simulation of stochastic rainfall models. A few of our modules may be of more general interest, and so I'll make these available below as and when I get them documented to an acceptable standard.

Contents of this page

Software to download.
Lecture notes.
Publications
Data sets
TSUNAMI final report (restricted access).

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Software to download

Most of the software I'm involved in writing is in FORTRAN 77. I'm perfectly well aware that this is regarded in many circles as "state of the ark", but the reason is that many of the applications we're involved in are engineering-based, and huge models exist which are written in FORTRAN having been started in the 1970s, and it would just be completely infeasible to change these things to a trendier language. So the focus is on compatibility. An alien concept to many IT people, in my experience. I try and stick to the F77 standard pretty much: where there are any departures, there is usually a comment in the code, or a note in the documentation, by way of warning.

The programs:

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Lecture notes

No, not for my UCL teaching stuff. If you're a student hoping to snaffle the lecture notes for the last 47 classes because you overslept, you won't have any joy here. I'd apologise for that if I was sorry, but I'm not.

Notes available:

Advanced Analytical methods for climate research. These pages contain lecture notes, datasets and software for a course given at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Beijing from June 12th-14th 2001. The course aims to introduce climatologists to concepts in probability modelling, in particular the use of Generalized Linear Models to quantify relationships between variables in the climate system in the presence of uncertainty.
Trend analysis for the environmental sciences - presentation given to the Environmental Statistics section of the Royal Statistical Society, on 14th March 2002. The material here includes datasets, code for analysing them and pointers to other resources. It is intended to provide a tutorial-style introduction to the broad topic of trend analysis, with a focus on environmental applications.

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Data sets

The data sets provided here have been used to illustrate methodologies in some of my research. Other people may also find them useful. NB further data sets can be found with the lecture notes above.

European wind speed data (8.3Mb zip archive): This data set relates to daily wind speed at 120 European locations, for the period 1958-1998. Also provided are annual values of 21 different indices of large-scale climate over this period, which may (or may not!) affect wind speed in Europe. These data have been analysed by Yan et al (2002), Chandler and Bate (2005) and Yan et al (2006). Definition files required to replicate these analyses using GLIMCLIM are also included in the distribution here.
The zip archive expands to around 40Mb when uncompressed. The file README.txt (contained within the archive) gives further details.
Annual maximum temperatures at Oxford and Worthing (12Kb zip archive): This archive contains a data file of annual maximum temperatures at Oxford and Worthing (England), for the period 1901 to 1980. It also contains some routines written in R (see http://www.R-project.org) for modelling these using generalised extreme value (GEV) distributions, following the methodology developed in Chandler and Bate (2005). The file README.txt (contained within the archive) gives further details.

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Publications

A list of selected publications can be found here. This contains links to material that is available online.

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Mail me if you've got nothing better to do.

Page last updated: 6th February 2006.