A Fast N ew M ethod for Statistically C haracterizing High-Resolution G eophysical F ields

1. A Fast New Method for Statistically Characterizing High-Resolution Geophysical Fields Objective Geophysical research often calls for robust and thorough statistical characterization of model output and data (e.g., estimating probability density functions—PDFs). Existing methods for estimating PDFs are generally computationally expensive, which inhibits their use for high-resolution datasets. 100x speed-up • Approach • Used a non-uniform, Fast Fourier Transform method to speed-up a robust new PDF estimation method by 100x • Applied this method to estimate PDFs of atmospheric wind from 1TB of high-resolution model output in ~1K CPU hours (vs the previously-required 100K) • Used this characterization to inform ongoing theoretical developments. Impact This work provides a computationally efficient statistical method that can be applied to a wide range of geophysics analyses. The 100x speed-up allows this method to be routinely used in big-data analysis problems. O'Brien, T. A., Collins, W. D., Rauscher, S. A., Ringler, T. D. (2014), Reducing the computational cost of the ECF using a nuFFT: A fast and objective probability density estimation method, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, In Press, doi:10.1016/j.csda.2014.06.002