development and testing of homogenisation methods: moving parameter experiments with acmant

Abstract

During the European project COST ES0601 (HOME) a new homogenisation method, ACMANT has been developed for the automatic homogenisation of monthly temperatures. ACMANT turned out to be one of the best performing methods during the blind test experiments of HOME. The methodological development of ACMANT has been continued since then, and nowadays ACMANT is likely the best homogenisation method for large and spatially dense temperature datasets. Ensemble moving parameter experiments have been done to obtain more information about the performance of ACMANT. The HOME Benchmark was used as test dataset, thus the results of the latest experiments with ACMANT are comparable with the performance of the other homogenisation methods participated in HOME. The results indicate that the performance of ACMANT is generally not sensitive to its parameterisation, i.e. the change of the performance is generally small for quite a wide range of each parameter. The presented methodology of moving parameter experiments provides results in a fast and easy to evaluate form.