Garden with Insight v1.0 Help: autocorrelation

The values of some variables recorded through time tend to resemble each other. For example, the amount of food you eat in any minute of the day is autocorrelated, or correlated with itself (auto) through time. Any system where there is some feedback such as a repository that is depleted (the amount of food in your stomach) tends to have some autocorrelation. Autocorrelation is sometimes called a lag effect, because the effect of each action has affects that lag after it has occurred.

This simulation uses autocorrelation to generate daily temperature and solar radiation. The repository here is heat from the sun stored in the earth. If you examine the temperature and solar radiation parameters for any climate in the simulation, the temperature peak tends to lag behind the solar radiation peak by about 80 days.

The autocorrelation matrix used in the simulation (which predicts today's radiation and temperature based in part on yesterday's) was calculated by examining climate data from one thousand climates over thirty years to find common trends. It is not a perfect predictor of climate variation, but it does simulate weather data similar to what one would find in a particular climate.

How it works:
weather simulation