Version 1.0 of climdex.pcic Released

The effects of climate change are felt not only through changes to the average climate of an area, but also through changes to climate extremes. Changes to the duration and frequency of these extreme hot, dry, cold and wet conditions are of interest to climate researchers and those planning for climate change adaptation. The Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) has formulated a standard suite of 27 climate extremes indices to quantify and better understand changes to climate extremes events, called CLIMDEX.

To assist with the calculation of these indices, PCIC is pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 of the 'climdex.pcic' package for the R programming language. This package provides an easy interface that allows flexible and efficient computation of the ETCCDI's CLIMDEX indices. Care has been taken to validate the climdex.pcic package versus the index definitions and other software; it matches the results of other software to the limits of numerical error. The performance of this software package should exceed that of other implementations, as improved algorithms have been developed, the code has been profiled, and the results of this profiling have been used to identify and fix slow paths.

This software is available on CRAN and from our Software Library.