Statistical Methods in Earth and Atmospheric Science

Welcome to these incomplete lecture notes on Statistical Methods in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences!

What is this?

A collection of lecture notes published as a free, open-access executable book.

Who is it for?

In short, anybody!

These cover the material for a semester-length course taught at The City College of New York (CCNY) in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students. For example, here is the site for the Fall 2025 iteration of that course.

But our hope is that others in the world will find them useful too in some capacity!

Warning

These are very much under construction! While some chapters are pretty polished, others are essentially just baskets of code cells used to generate plots for the slides used in-class. (Currently the slides are not publicly available, but eventually those will be made open-access also.)

What can I do with it?

Pretty much anything! This is 100% open-source software. We sincerely hope you’re able to use them in some way that advances your learning or teaching.

In particular, we’d love any suggestions for improvements, which you can submit by creating an Issue or Pull Request on the Github repository where they live—which you can also find via the “Octocat” silhouette logo at the top of this page.

Who made it?

Spencer Hill did, beginning in Fall 2023, while teaching the corresponding course at CCNY for the first time. In summer 2025, the course-specific materials for each iteration of the class at CCNY were split off from this repo to their own dedicated repos.

And beginning in Fall 2025, students enrolled in the course at CCNY will begin contributing to the repo as part of an assignment to get them more comfortable with git and Github.