Welcome by my web site. I am a Project Scientist in NCAR's Research Applications Laboratory. My main research interests are spatial forecast verification methods and statistical extreme value analysis.

Eric Gilleland, Ph.D. (CV)
Project Scientist
Forecast Evaluation and Applied Statistics
Joint Numerical Testbed (JNT)
Research Applications Laboratory (RAL)

National Center for Atmospheric Research
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, CO 80307
USA

• Ph.D. (2005), Statistics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado.^*
• M.S. (1998), Statistics, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.
• B.A. (1996), Mathematics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado.

^*Dissertation Title: "Statistical models for quantifying the spatial distribution of seasonally derived ozone standards." (The data are a subset of the data that can be found on the IMAGe site under the "Data" tab; perhaps here, though this is subject to change without my knowing it).

Advisers: Douglas W. Nychka and Thomas C.M. Lee

Research Assistant with NCAR's Geophysical Statistics Project (GSP) while studying at CSU. GSP is now part of the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe -- French pronunciation).

• Refereed Publications
• Technical Notes
• Book Chapters
• Other
• From the Desk

Gilleland, E., M. Ribatet and A. G. Stephenson, 2012: A software review for extreme value analysis. Submitted to Extremes (pdf).

Gilleland, E., 2011: Spatial Forecast Verification: Baddeley's Delta Metric Applied to the ICP Test Cases, Wea. Forecasting, 26(3), 409--415.

Gilleland, E. and Katz, R.W., 2011: New software to analyze how extremes change over time. Eos, 11 January, 92 (2), 13--14. (pdf)

de Oliveira, M.M.F., N.F.F. Ebecken, J.L.F. de Oliveira and E. Gilleland, 2011: Generalized extreme wind speed distributions in South America over the Atlantic Ocean region, Theor. Appl. Climatol., 104, (3--4), 377--385, DOI 10.1007/s00704-010-0350-3.

Gilleland, E., D.A. Ahijevych, B.G. Brown and E.E. Ebert, 2010: Verifying Forecasts Spatially. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., October, 1365--1373.

Gilleland, E., J. Lindström, and F. Lindgren, 2010. Analyzing the image warp forecast verification method on precipitation fields from the ICP. Wea. Forecasting, 25 (4), 1249--1262.

Heaton, M.J., M. Katzfuss, S. Ramachandar, K. Pedings, E. Gilleland, E. Mannshardt-Shamseldin, and R.L. Smith, 2010: Spatio-Temporal Models for Large-scale Indicators of Extreme Weather. Environmetrics, 22, 294--303.

Towler, E., B. Rajagopalan, E. Gilleland, R.S. Summers, D. Yates, and R.W. Katz, 2010: Modeling hydrologic and water quality extremes in a changing climate. Water Resources Research, 46, W11504, doi:10.1029/2009WR008876.

Ahijevych, D., E. Gilleland, B.G. Brown, and E.E. Ebert, 2009. Application of spatial verification methods to idealized and NWP gridded precipitation forecasts. Wea. Forecasting, 24 (6), 1485--1497.

Gilleland, E., D. Ahijevych, B.G. Brown, B. Casati, and E.E. Ebert, 2009. Intercomparison of Spatial Forecast Verification Methods. Wea. Forecasting, 24, 1416--1430, DOI: 10.1175/2009WAF2222269.1.

Abeysirigunawardena, D.S., E. Gilleland, D. Bronaugh, 2009. Extreme wind regime responses to climate variability and change in the inner-south-coast of British Columbia Canada. Atmosphere-Ocean, 47(1):41--61.

Gilleland, E., T.C.M. Lee, J. Halley Gotway, R.G. Bullock, and B.G. Brown, 2008. Computationally efficient spatial forecast verification using Baddeley's Δ image metric. Mon. Wea. Rev. 136(5):1747--1757.

Gilleland, E. and T.L. Fowler, 2006. Network design for verification of ceiling and visibility forecasts. Environmetrics, 17(6):575--589.

Stephenson, A. and E. Gilleland, 2005. Software for the Analysis of Extreme Events: The Current State and Future Directions. Extremes, 8:87--109.

Gilleland, E. and D.W. Nychka, 2005. Statistical Models for Monitoring and Regulating Ground-level Ozone. Environmetrics, 16: 535--546.

Gilleland, E., L. Chen, M. DePersio, G. Do, K. Eilertson, Y. Jin, E.L. Kang, F. Lindgren, J. Lindström, R.L. Smith, and C. Xia, 2011. Spatial Forecast Verification: Image Warping. NCAR Technical Note, TN-482+STR, 23pp.

Gilleland, E., 2010: Confidence intervals for forecast verification. NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-479+STR, 71pp.

Brown, B.G., Gilleland, E. and Ebert, E.E., 2012. Chapter 6: Forecasts of spatial fields. pp. 95--117, Forecast Verification: A Practitioner's Guide in Atmospheric Science, 2nd edition. Edts. IT Jolliffee and DB Stephenson, Wiley, Chichester, West Sussex, UK, 274 pp.

Gilleland, E., D.W. Nychka, and U. Schneider, 2006. Spatial models for the distribution of extremes, Hierarchical modelling for the Environmental Sciences: statistical methods and applications, Edts. JS Clark and A Gelfand. Oxford University Press, New York pp.170--183. ISBN 0-19-8569671

Papers in this "Other Publications" section are fairly refined drafts published in some non-refereed venue; typically conference preprints.

Gilleland, E., M. Pocernich, H.E. Brooks, B.G. Brown, and P. Marsh, 2008. Large-scale indicators for severe weather. Proceedings of the American Statistical Association (ASA) Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), 3-7 August 2008, Denver, Colorado. (pdf)

Ahijevych, D.A., E. Gilleland, B.G. Brown, E.E. Ebert, L. Holland, and C. Davis, 2008. Intercomparison of spatial verification methods. 88th Annual American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana. 9.1 Probability/Statistics conference.

Gilleland, E. and R.W. Katz. "Analyzing seasonal to interannual extreme weather and climate variability with the extremes toolkit (extRemes)", 18th Conference on Climate Variability and Change, 86th American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting, 29 January - 2 February, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia. P2.15 (contributed poster). (pdf)

Gilleland, E. and R.W. Katz, 2005. Tutorial for The Extremes Toolkit: Weather and Climate Applications of Extreme Value Statistics, http://www.isse.ucar.edu/extremevalues/evtk.html

Gilleland, E., 2004. Optimizing METAR Network Design for Verification of Cloud Ceiling Height and Visibility Forecasts, conference proceedings (preprint) for the 2004 joint meeting of The Fifteenth Annual Conference of The International Environmetrics Society and The Sixth International Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, 28 June - 1 July, 2004, Portland, ME.

Gilleland, E., 2004. 2.5 Improving forecast verification through network design, proceedings of the 17th Conference on Probablity and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences, 84th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), 10 - 15 January, 2004, Seattle, WA.

Papers in this "From the Desk" section are rough but ready (or sort of ready) papers that may (or may not) at some point be completed into a paper or technical note.

Gilleland, E., 2010: Confidence intervals for forecast verification: Practical considerations, (pdf).

Gilleland, E. and D.W. Nychka, 2009. Spatial forecast verification: Thin-plate splines. 18 June 2009. (pdf)

• Project Organization
• Conferences/Workshops/Presentations
• Reading Groups
• Visits
• History of English Presentation

• Organizing Lead: Spatial Forecast Verification Methods Inter-Comparison Project (ICP)

• 2012 ASME Verification and Validation Symposium, Spatial Weather Forecast Verification (pdf), 3 May 2012, Planet Hollywood Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada.
• WRF User Tutorial, 23 January - 3 February, 2012, Boulder, Colorado.
  • Gilleland et al., Spatial Forecast Verification, 31 January, 2012 (pdf)
• American Meteorological Society 92nd Annual Meeting, 22--26 January 2012, New Orleans, Louisiana,
  • Gilleland et al., 6.1: A Field Deformation Approach to Spatio-Temporal Forecast Verification of Gridded Sets, Wednesday, 25 January 2012, 21st Conference on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences (pdf).
• American Statistical Association (ASA) Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), 30 July 2011, Miami Beach, Florida, U.S.A.
  • Gilleland et al., Gridded forecast verification (pdf).
• 2011 ASP Colloquium on "Statistical Assessment of Extreme Weather Phenomena under Climate Change", organizing committee. Tutorials on EVA software in R (Presentation Slides, Problem Sets)

• "Statistical analysis of Extremes in Geophysical Science"
• Forecast Verification

12-14 September 2011. Shell Technology Center, Houston, Texas, U.S.A.

5-6 October 2009. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, IPSL-CNRS, Gif-Sur-Yvette, France.

21 October to 3 November 2007. Mathematical Statistics, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
    Seminar: Method for Object-based Diagnostic Evaluation (MODE): A features-based spatial forecast verification technique (pdf), 26 October 2008.

Seminar presentation for NCAR's English as a Second Language (ESL) group on origins of English: English--It could have been worse, 14 May 2008.

Presentation on Frisian (and its connection to English) for IBM's 2009 Take Our Children to Work Day (pdf).

Eric Gilleland (2011). SpatialVx: Spatial Forecast Verification. R package version 0.1-1. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=SpatialVx (see also http://www.ral.ucar.edu/projects/icp/SpatialVx/)

Gilleland, Eric, Katz, Rick, and Young, Greg (2004) extRemes: Extremes: Weather and Climate Applications of Extreme Value Statistics. Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) for extreme value software in the R (http://www.r-project.org) programming language.

Gilleland, Eric and Nychka, Douglas (2001) DI: Design Interface. S-Plus functions (Windows) for interactive network design problems (draws on previous work by Nancy Saltzman and J. Andrew Royle).

Hoar, Tim, Gilleland, Eric, and Nychka, Douglas (2000) RadioSonde. A package of R (http://www.r-project.org) functions for reading in radiosonde data, and making meteorological plots, such as skew-T diagrams.

Information page on Software for Extreme Value Theory originally created by Alec Stephenson, and now maintained at NCAR by Eric Gilleland.

Useful Links

• Libraries
• Professional Societies and Organizations

• NCAR
• University of Colorado
• Colorado State University

• American Geophysical Union
• American Meteorological Society (AMS)
• AMS Committee on Probability and Statistics
• American Statistical Association
• R Project for Statistical Computing
• The International Environmetrics Society (TIES)
• Spatial Accuracy Research Group

The "work of art" above is a distance map loss differential for a particular case of the NSSL/SPC Spring 2005 Experiment from the ARW model.

The above "work of art" is a graph of loss differentials using correlation loss function averaged over time for some test cases. Below, randomly generated hurricane track ensembles with associated 90% confidence Gaussian ellipses.

Deaf Symphony (my cousin Howard's heavy metal band)

Piter Wilkens (right) writes and sings songs in Frisian.