MODELING AND FORECASTING MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE OF WARRI

The influence of temperature on environmental factors and human endeavors cannot be over emphasis. The influence spans through agricultural activities like the rate of soil respiration and degradation as well as carbon cycle and seasons among many others to global climatic change. These underline the importance of the temperature and the need to develop modeling and forecasting tools as strategies for long-term planning. Here-in lays the motivation for studying and modeling patterns of temperature in Warri a town in Nigeria using seasonal ARIMA models. We obtained historical data of average monthly maximum temperature for the period 1994-2008 for the studies and those of 2009 for forecast validation of the chosen model, from the National Metrological Center, Oshodi- Nigeria. Model identification was by visual inspection of both the sample ACF and sample PACF to postulate many possible models and then use the model selection criterion of Residual Sum of Square RSS, Akaike’s Information Criterion AIC complemented with the Schwartz’s Bayesian Criterion SBC, to choose the best model. The chosen model is the SARIMA (1, 1, 1) (0, 1, 2) process which met the criterion of model parsimony with low AIC value of-797.81253 and SBC value of-785.34056.Model adequacy checks shows that the model is appropriate. The model was used to forecast temperature for 2009 and the forecast compared very well with the observed empirical data for 2009. Researchers will find this resul