On the spatial and temporal shift in the archetypal seasonal temperature cycle as driven by annual and semi-annual harmonics

Abstract: Statistical methods are required to evaluate and quantify the uncertainty in environmental processes, such as land and sea surface temperature, in a changing climate. Typically, annual harmonics are used to characterize the variation in the seasonal temperature cycle. However, an often overlooked feature of the climate seasonal cycle is the semi-annual harmonic, which can account for a significant portion of the variance of the seasonal cycle and varies in amplitude and phase across space. Together, the spatial variation in the annual and semi-annual harmonics can play an important role in driving processes that are tied to seasonality (e.g., ecological and agricultural processes). We propose a multivariate spatio-temporal model to quantify the spatial and temporal change in minimum and maximum temperature seasonal cycles as a function of the annual and semi-annual harmonics. Our approach captures spatial dependence, temporal dynamics, and multivariate dependence of these harmonics through spatially and temporally-varying coefficients. We apply the model to minimum and maximum temperature over North American for the years 1979 to 2018. Formal model inference within the Bayesian paradigm enables the identification of regions experiencing significant changes in minimum and maximum temperature seasonal cycles due to the relative effects of changes in the two harmonics.