Catalog of basin-scale climate indices

Unlike the gridded variables, these have no spatial dimension — one value per month describes the whole basin. They enter a model as a shared state every observation in a month experiences, which is a different kind of covariate from local temperature: they carry no information about where within a region conditions are better, only about what year and season it was.

Usage

climate_indices()

Value

a named list, one entry per index, each with label, units, source, url, and description

Details

That makes them useful for interannual questions ("was this a warm-regime year?") and useless for spatial ones. A model given only indices cannot produce a map.

See also

fetch_climate_index(), attach_climate_index()

Examples

names(climate_indices())
#> [1] "NAO"  "AO"   "AMO"  "PDO"  "LCR"  "AMOC"