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Statistical Services Centre
Applied Statistics at the University of Reading
...making sense of statistics
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The SSC has been involved in climatic work for over two decades. Our consistent aim has been to support national meteorological services and their clients to make better use of climatic records for agricultural and other applications. We have collaborated with, and been largely supported by, the UK Met Office, the World Climate Programme of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), and DFID.
The SSC has trained over 400 people from meteorological services, universities and research institutes worldwide. Each Summer from 1985 to 2002, an intensive two-month training course called 'SIAC' (Statistics in Applied Climatology) was run in Reading. Throughout the 1990s a two-week training programme, organised by WMO with SSC input, was devised and run in each of the WMO regions.
We continue to assist on training in Africa, where a biannual two-month workshop has been run at IMTR in Nairobi since 2000 and at AGRHYMET in Niger (in French) since 2002. National and regional training courses were delivered in Harare, Nairobi, Niamey, Oran and Gaborone from 2003 to 2007, and further courses are planned.
An innovative venture begun in 2005 was the development of e-SIAC — a facilitated, online version of the SIAC course. For further information, see the e-SIAC course announcement page, and the SIAC e-learning website.
Much of our training in climatic applications is based around the general-purpose statistics package called Instat, which was developed by us specifically for statistical training. It includes a special menu giving access to a variety of climatic analyses, together with a 400-page Climatic Guide.
For those who need more than Instat provides, we recommend Genstat, one of the major commercial statistics packages. To give guidance, we provide a publication called Analysing Climatic Data using GenStat for Windows (and associated datasets).
In many developing countries, Clicom is the primary software package used for climatic data management. The SSC has been directly involved in installation/training for Clicom in 12 countries and indirectly in many more, through Clicom training in Reading. New software is now being developed; we have assisted with the programming and documentation of ClimSoft in Zimbabwe, Kenya and Guinea. ClimSoft evolved out of Clicom and the 'Logbook' software developed at the World Agroforestry Centre. Initially ClimSoft was based on Microsoft® Access™ but has since been developed further to make use of MySQL.
For further information, contact Roger Stern or Ian Dale.
7 December, 2007