Quote:
Originally Posted by aurora
No, it isn't.
If the distribution is normal, about 99.5% of the observations would fall within +/- 3 SD of the mean.
You've got daily data for 24 years? About 8700 days? And the best evidence you have is just slightly over 3 standard deviations?
Get thee to an introductory statistics course.
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He's aggregating the ~8700 data points into 29 totals, so he's not looking directly at the individual values. I'm more concerned about his assumption of normal distribution - rainfall data are emphatically
not normally distributed, and the totals are going to be highly sensitive to a handful of outliers. (In other words, a couple of good downpours might account for most of the total for a given aggregate).
I agree entirely with your last paragraph, though.