Modelled trends in climate and vegetation and characteristics of extreme events

UHOH will gather existing climate data perform quality control literature research and hypothesis formulation for the climate model Then it will characterize trends test for presence and quantify seasonality in rainfall temperature and NDVI Trends and seasonality in rainfall temperature and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index NDVI in the Greater SerengetiMara Ecosystem will be modelled using structural timeseries models semiparametric generalized linear mixed models and spectral density analysis UHOH will also test for spatial coherence in the established trends and seasonality in rainfall temperature and NDVI across the Greater SerengetiMara Ecosystem Evidence for regional temperature warming and progressive habitat desiccation will be assessed using semiparametric regression analysis Ruppert 2003 based on penalized cubic Bsplines and constructed penalized cubic basis spline effects to contrast temperatures at any two given time points to test for significance of a warming trend UHOH will use existing rainfall data conduct appropriate quality controls literature review and develop hypotheses for the drought and flood model Next it will quantify the recurrence frequency severity timing and multiannual persistence of climatic extremes UHOH will also use statistics of rarity to quantify recurrence frequency of climatic extremes standardized percentile departure from longterm means to quantify severity and lagautocorrelations and number of runs of wet or dry years to quantify multiannual persistence of droughts and floods in the time series of rainfall temperature and NDVI in Greater SerengetiMara EcosystemUHOH will quantify sudden and dramatic switches level shifts in longterm annual and seasonal rainfall ie longterm change shortterm extremes temporal sequencing of shortterm extremes and magnitudes of switches Existing climate data will be used to assess evidence of substantial level shifts in rainfall and temperature their temporal sequence of occurrence and magnitude UHOH will use the existing climate data to seek evidence for seasonal oscillations in weather components in Greater SerengetiMara Ecosystem UHOH will also test for presence and significance of oscillations and quantify quasiperiodic oscillations in total monthly rainfall and average monthly temperature and NDVI using periodograms spectral density analysis Portmanteau and cumulative periodogram tests and univariate structural equation models