Homogenization of daily temperatures using covariates and statistical learning—The case of parallel measurements

A data driven method based on generalized additive modelling (GAM) has been developed for homogenizing daily minimum and maximum temperature (TN, TX) series using parallel measurements and covariates. The method is applied to two coastal and two inland stations in the Netherlands. Between 1950 and 1972, these stations were relocated from cities to airports, accompanied by parallel measurement of at least 5 years at the old and new sites. Separating these parallel measurements in training and test data, the method compares numerous models involving covariates like the wind vector, cloudiness, specific humidity and sea surface temperature, and selects a model for each station. The resulting models offer an improvement compared to models based on temperature and season only: seasonal dependence is largely replaced by dependence on physical quantities. However, quantitatively, the impact is not large in the cases studied. One of the reasons might be that some covariates have only been measured at specific times not coinciding with the occurrences of the temperature minima or maxima. Additional benefits of the method are robustness and estimation of the sampling error variance of the daily homogenized daily temperature values.