UC Berkeley

This thesis explores statistical methods for characterizing the occurrences and impacts of climate. Data on climate and the environment more broadly show unique characteristics, posing methodological challenges.

Part I presents an overview of an emerging, accessible earth observation data source, satellite images, and explores its potential applications in statistical and causal inference. We introduce an approach for incorporating image data, represented by image features, into a regression framework as a potential proxy for confounding variables. The study examines the impact of image features on regression estimates, focusing on the characterization of bias with and without the inclusion of images, as well as the conditions under which the inclusion of image data reduces or amplifies bias.

Part II introduces an empirical and methodological problem related to estimating the economic values of the environment. This question is pertinent for understanding how various environmental qualities, such as flood risk and air pollution, are currently reflected in residential property values and how society manages climate and environmental risks. However, a methodological challenge in estimating capitalization lies in the difficulty of accounting for confounders, which invites the application of the method studied in Part I. The results indicate that while some risk-related factors are associated with lower housing values, others, such as PM 2.5 and flood risk score, are associated with higher housing prices. This provides a lens through which to discuss how risks could be reflected in property values.

Part III focuses on statistical methods for characterizing occurrences of extreme climate events. These data are spatio-temporal in nature, and effectively visualizing and summarizing such data is challenging, though crucial for monitoring and identifying hazardous events. A primary challenge stems from the context-dependent nature of extreme events, where definitions vary over time and space. While many adopted approaches involve pre-defining criteria for anomalous events, typically by setting an exceedance threshold, determining appropriate values for the exceedance threshold, time window, and spatial boundary is a non-trivial task. The study applies functional principal component analysis to characterize spatio-temporal trends of extreme precipitation. The method shows potential as a flexible way to identify both the temporal window and geographic location of anomalous events.