TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bürger, Gerd
T1  - A counterexample to decomposing climate shifts and trends by weather types
T2  - International Journal of Climatology
N2  - The literature contains a sizable number of publications where weather types are used to decompose climate shifts or trends into contributions of frequency and mean of those types. They are all based on the product rule, that is, a transformation of a product of sums into a sum of products, the latter providing the decomposition. While there is nothing to argue about the transformation itself, its interpretation as a climate shift or trend decomposition is bound to fail. While the case of a climate shift may be viewed as an incomplete description of a more complex behaviour, trend decomposition indeed produces bogus trends, as demonstrated by a synthetic counterexample with well-defined trends in type frequency and mean. Consequently, decompositions based on that transformation, be it for climate shifts or trends, must not be used.
KW  - analysis
KW  - climate
KW  - statistical methods
Y1  - 2018
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/52650
SN  - 0899-8418
SN  - 1097-0088
VL  - 38
IS  - 9
SP  - 3732
EP  - 3735
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -