Time‐Series Analysis: A Cautionary Tale

Abstract

Time-series analysis has often been a useful tool in atmospheric science for deriving long-term trends in various atmospherically important parameters (e.g., temperature or the concentration of trace gas species). In particular, time-series analysis has been repeatedly applied to satellite datasets in order to derive the long-term trends in stratospheric ozone, which is a critical atmospheric constituent. However, many of the potential pitfalls relating to the non-uniform sampling of the datasets were often ignored and the results presented by the scientific community have been unknowingly biased. A newly developed and more robust application of this technique is applied to the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE) II version 7.0 ozone dataset and the previous biases and newly derived trends are presented.