Use R for Climate Research

This tutorial gives you an introduction to the R programming language for statistical analysis and modeling. Examples are taken from our research into hurricane climate. It was developed with support from the Florida State University, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Risk Prediction Initiative of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences. You should follow along with an open R session. The key strokes are given in red font. If you're not fast at typing, they can be copied from the pdf and pasted into your R session. Output from an R command is given in blue Courier New font. Questions for which answers are sought and practice problems are given in green font. The tutorial is divided into 5 sections. We begin with some motivations for giving R a try and some information on how to download and install R on your computer. We show you how to use R as a calculator. In section 2 we show you how to enter data into R, how to query your data, and how to obtain some statistical information about your data including correlation. In section 3 we provide an introduction to using R for graphing your data. In section 4 we show you how R can be used to model data. Topics include linear regression, Poisson regression, and quantile regression. In section 5 we list additional resource material. 1