Teaching statistics with Lagrangian trajectories

Have you ever felt your teaching of Statistics is dry, and also boring to students? Some topics are more challenging and grueling in this respect than others. Here, I will show how certain statistical topics and concepts, namely: probability distributions and moments, inference with confidence intervals and hypothesis testing (traditional and more modern approaches like bootstrap), random processes, correlation and cross-correlation, can be compellingly presented using Lagrangian surface drifter trajectories. It is thanks to the physical interpretation of Lagrangian trajectories, which encode information about the ocean flow kinematics and its spatio-temporal variability, that makes the process of applying statistical methods captivating