Exploratory data analysis in the geophysical sciences

Abstract

Exploratory data analysis (EDA) techniques are particularly relevant to the geophysical sciences, since geophysical systems typically possess multiple correlations of a variety of parameters on widely differing time scales, often in conjunction with temporal patterns of low intensity but high importance. In this article a variety of EDA techniques (robust statistics, scatterplots, histograms, stem‐and‐leaf diagrams, box plots, trend analysis programs, and quantile‐quantile plots) are applied to geophysical data to demonstrate the successful elucidation of information difficult or impossible to extract from the data by more formal and traditional statistical approaches.