SPATIOTEMPORAL ANALYSIS AND PROCESSING OF THERMOMETRIC DATA OVER BELGIUM

Thermometric measurements over Belgium provide a considerable amount o f spatiotemporal data, the study of which can provide valuable informa tion for a variety of atmospheric studies, agricultural activities, po llution control, etc. In this work, a data set that includes a year of daily temperature measurements at 121 stations and shows a complicate d variation in space and time is selected and analyzed using a spatiot emporal random field model. This model has three random components and a space/time mean function, which allow considerable flexibility in a nalytical calculations and rigorous assessment of the spatiotemporal v ariation of temperature. A space/time estimation system is formulated and solved to provide detailed temperature maps over the whole country . The composite space/time analysis offers valuable physical insight t hat could not have been obtained on the basis of a purely spatial or a purely temporal analysis of the temperature data set. The variability between successive days at a monitoring station is considerably more important than spatial variability throughout the country at a given d ay, and therefore limited improvements should be expected regarding te mperature forecasting and interpolation by focusing only on the spatia l aspect of the temperature variation.