Climate Extremes Analyzer



You can access sample input files for download here: DropBox


What is Climate Extremes Analyzer Tool?

The Climate Extremes Analyzer (CEA) is an advanced desktop software application designed for researchers, environmental scientists, hydrologists, and data analysts who work with climate and weather data—particularly in the domain of extreme events analysis. This powerful, user-friendly tool facilitates the detection, characterization, and statistical modeling of climate extremes using daily or sub-daily time series data from CSV or NetCDF formats.

Whether the focus is on analyzing extreme temperature, rainfall, wind speed, or pressure data, the Climate Extremes Analyzer provides comprehensive capabilities for quantifying thresholds, assessing risks, and modeling return periods using well-established statistical methods. Built with the latest technologies and an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), it offers both flexibility and robustness for analyzing climate variability and extremes under historical or future climate scenarios.

Core Functionality

  • Import time series data from NetCDF or CSV files with datetime values.
  • Subset NetCDF data using custom latitude/longitude or grid-point selection.
  • Visualize and extract statistical summaries of climate extremes.
  • Apply fixed-value and percentile-based threshold analyses.
  • Fit distributions like GEV, Gumbel, Normal, Log-Normal, Exponential, Gamma, Weibull, and Beta.
  • Compute probability of exceedance and return periods for defined thresholds.
  • Generate statistical goodness-of-fit summaries and diagnostic plots.
  • Export detailed text-based reports and overlay histograms with PDFs.

Unique Features

  • Unit Conversion: Supports Kelvin to Celsius, flux to mm/day, knots to m/s, and more.
  • Interactive Toolbar: Quick access to help, website, data viewer, and settings.
  • Settings Dialog: Customize histogram bins, apply epsilon clipping, or multiplier adjustments.
  • Exceedance Analysis: Thresholds can be fixed, percentiles, or between ranges.
  • Plain-Language Interpretation: The tool explains each result clearly to the user.
  • Scientific Visualizations: Create CDF, PDF, Q-Q, and P-P plots with overlay histograms.
  • 🔧 Epsilon Clipping: Remove values less than a user-defined epsilon. Helpful for removing near-zero rainfall in some distributions.

Who Should Use CEA?

  • Climate Scientists: To assess changes in heatwaves, rainfall extremes, etc.
  • Hydrologists: For flood/drought return period analysis and model calibration.
  • Agricultural Researchers: To analyze climate stress and variability in agro-climatic zones.
  • Graduate Students and Educators: As an educational tool for teaching extreme value theory and climate analysis.
  • Policy Analysts: To support decision-making on climate adaptation and risk assessment.

How Can We Use the Climate Extremes Analyzer Tool?

Using the Climate Extremes Analyzer (CEA) is designed to be both intuitive and powerful. It supports users in analyzing climate extremes through a step-by-step graphical interface, with options to configure data thresholds, distribution fitting, and visualization settings.

Step-by-step usage:

  • 1. Load Your Data: Choose a time series dataset in either CSV format or NetCDF format. For NetCDF, you can specify a spatial subset using latitude and longitude values. If using a CSV, ensure it contains a datetime column and a variable column.
  • 2. Preprocess (Optional): You may apply unit conversion (e.g., Kelvin to Celsius, mm/s to mm/day) or epsilon clipping to remove near-zero values like minimal rainfall before statistical modeling.
  • 3. Set Thresholds: Define thresholds manually (e.g., values greater than 308), between two values (e.g., 295-305), or use percentile-based thresholds (e.g., 95th percentile).
  • 4. Choose Distribution: Select one of several statistical distributions to model your annual maximum or minimum values. Options include Gumbel, GEV, Normal, Exponential, Gamma, Weibull, Log-Normal, and Beta.
  • 5. Run Analysis: Click the Run Analysis button to calculate exceedance statistics, return periods, and fit parameters for the chosen distribution. CEA also performs statistical tests such as KS test and Shapiro-Wilk for goodness-of-fit validation.
  • 6. Interpret Results: The tool generates a detailed textual summary that includes parameter estimates, exceedance probabilities, sample statistics (mean, std, skewness, kurtosis), and p-values. Results are explained in plain language to assist interpretation.
  • 7. View Visualizations: CEA automatically creates charts including:
    • PDF and CDF plots for the selected distribution
    • Overlayed histogram with fitted PDF curve
    • Q-Q Plot: Visualizes how quantiles align with the fitted distribution
    • P-P Plot: Compares empirical and fitted CDF values
  • 8. Export or Review: Results can be copied from the result box, and input data can be reviewed through a dedicated data viewer window for transparency.

With all steps fully integrated into the desktop interface and tooltips embedded for every input field, Climate Extremes Analyzer simplifies complex climate statistics and makes it accessible for scientists and professionals alike.