Abstract/Summary

The aim of this paper is essentially twofold: first, to describe the use of spherical nonparametric estimators for determining statistical diagnostic fields from ensembles of feature tracks on a global domain, and second, to report the application of these techniques to data derived from a modern general circulation model. New spherical kernel functions are introduced that are more efficiently computed than the traditional exponential kernels. The data-driven techniques of cross-validation to determine the amount elf smoothing objectively, and adaptive smoothing to vary the smoothing locally, are also considered. Also introduced are techniques for combining seasonal statistical distributions to produce longer-term statistical distributions. Although all calculations are performed globally, only the results for the Northern Hemisphere winter (December, January, February) and Southern Hemisphere winter (June, July, August) cyclonic activity are presented, discussed, and compared with previous studies. Overall, results for the two hemispheric winters are in good agreement with previous studies, both for model-based studies and observational studies.