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Global and regional climate model projections are useful for gauging future patterns of climate variables, including solar radiation, but data from these models is often too coarse to assess local impacts. Within the context of solar radiation, the changing climate may have an effect on photovoltaic (PV) production, especially as the PV industry moves to extend plant lifetimes to 50 years. Predicting PV production while taking into account a changing climate requires data at a resolution that is useful for building PV plants. Although temporal and spatial downscaling of solar radiation data is widely studied, we present a novel method to downscale solar radiation data from daily averages to hourly profiles, while maintaining spatial correlation of parameters characterizing the diurnal profile of solar radiation. The method focuses on the use of a diurnal template which can be shifted and scaled according to the time or year and location and the use of thin plate splines for spatial downscaling. This analysis is applied to data from the National Solar Radiation Database housed at the National Renewable Energy Lab and a case study of the mentioned methods over several sub-regions of continental United States is presented., Comment: 35 pages, 14 figures

Discussion of "A statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies: Are reconstructions of surface temperatures over the last 1000 years reliable?" by B.B. McShane and A.J. Wyner [arXiv:1104.4002], Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS398K the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

Nonlinear regression is a useful statistical tool, relating observed data and a nonlinear function of unknown parameters. When the parameter-dependent nonlinear function is computationally intensive, a straightforward regression analysis by maximum likelihood is not feasible. The method presented in this paper proposes to construct a faster running surrogate for such a computationally intensive nonlinear function, and to use it in a related nonlinear statistical model that accounts for the uncertainty associated with this surrogate. A pivotal quantity in the Earth's climate system is the climate sensitivity: the change in global temperature due to doubling of atmospheric $\mathrm{CO}_2$ concentrations. This, along with other climate parameters, are estimated by applying the statistical method developed in this paper, where the computationally intensive nonlinear function is the MIT 2D climate model., Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOAS210 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

Atmospheric Carbon Monoxide (CO) provides a window on the chemistry of the atmosphere since it is one of few chemical constituents that can be remotely sensed, and it can be used to determine budgets of other greenhouse gases such as ozone and OH radicals. Remote sensing platforms in geostationary Earth orbit will soon provide regional observations of CO at several vertical layers with high spatial and temporal resolution. However, cloudy locations cannot be observed and estimates of the complete CO concentration fields have to be estimated based on the cloud-free observations. The current state-of-the-art solution of this interpolation problem is to combine cloud-free observations with prior information, computed by a deterministic physical model, which might introduce uncertainties that do not derive from data. While sharing features with the physical model, this paper suggests a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate the complete CO concentration fields. The paper also provides a direct comparison to state-of-the-art methods. To our knowledge, such a model and comparison have not been considered before., Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOAS168 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)