[Qgis-user] Continentality

[Alex M]

On 02/11/2016 11:15 AM, Michael.Dodd wrote:
> Can 'continentality' be derived just using gis with land masses and latitude and if so how using qgis?  I am not a meterologist/climate scientist. On one hand it would seem a simple thing to look at distances to the coast and assume bigger distance to coast = bigger temperature range = higher value of continentality but there is probably more to it than this with other regular factors large scale weather systems such as monsoons and topography playing a role?
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Technically yes, QGIS contains the necessary tools to do such analysis.
This is not a simple task though and would be informed by reviewing
previously published methods from scientists.

The simplistic method, would be to take your dependent variables
(distance to coast, elevation, latitude, etc), and say historical
temperatures or temperature ranges (e.g. worldclim.org) and create a
statistical model (linear regression to start). That would tell you how
much each of those variables influences the result. This is a raster
approach + statistics.

As I mentioned before though this is a very rough way to do it, there
are much more sophisticated methods. So it all depends on your end goals
how deep you get into doing these sorts of things.

Enjoy,
Alex