Title: Modelling space-time varying ENSO teleconnections to droughts in North America (slides)
Abstract: Teleconnection in atmospheric science refers to a significant correlation between climate anomalies in widely separated regions (typically thousands of kilometres), and it is often considered to be responsible for extreme weather conditions occurring simultaneously over large distances. In this paper, we study the influence of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) teleconnection on meteorological droughts represented by the Palmer Severity Drought Index (PSDI) across North America from 1870 to 1990. We develop a flexible statistical framework based on spatial random effects to model the covariance (teleconnection) between winter (October- March) sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific and summer (June-August) droughts in North America. Our model allows us to analyze the dynamic pattern of teleconnection over space and time, and results indicate that the influence of ENSO teleconnections on droughts varies spatially and temporally across North America. We further provide the time-varying teleconnection estimates with their uncertainties for 12 subregions in North America.
Biography
Dr. Bo Li received her PhD in Statistics from Texas A&M University in 2006, and then she became a Post-Doc at National Center for Atmospheric Research before joining Purdue as an Assistant Professor in 2008. In 2013 she moved to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Associate Professor. Dr. Li’s research mainly focuses on spatial and spatio-temporal statistics and statistical problems in climatology, atmospheric and environmental sciences, and public health. The picture is attached here.
