Page 6 - MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences

VI Preface

theoretical background, but then tries to teach the application of all methods
by means of examples. The software MATLAB is used since it provides
numerous ready-to-use algorithms for most methods of data analysis, but
also gives the opportunity to modify and expand the existing routines and
even develop new software. The book contains numerous MATLAB scripts
to solve typical problems in earth sciences, such as simple statistics, time-
series analysis, geostatistics and image processing. The book comes with a
compact disk, which contains all MATLAB recipes and example data fi les.

All MATLAB codes can be easily modified in order to be applied to the
reader·s data and projects.
Whereas undergraduates participating in a course on data analysis might
go through the entire book, the more experienced reader will use only one

particular method to solve a specific problem. To facilitate the use of this
book for the various readers, I outline the concept of the book and the con-
tents of its chapters.

1. Chapter 1 – This chapter introduces some fundamental concepts of sam-
ples and populations, it links the various types of data and questions to
be answered from these data to the methods described in the following
chapters.

2. Chapter 2 – A tutorial-style introduction to MATLAB designed for earth
scientists. Readers already familiar with the software are advised to pro-
ceed directly to the following chapters.

3. Chapter 3 and 4 – Fundamentals in univariate and bivariate statistics.
These chapters contain very basic things how statistics works, but also
introduce some more advanced topics such as the use of surrogates. The
reader already familiar with basic statistics might skip these two chap-
ters.

4. Chapter 5 and 6 – Readers who wish to work with time series are recom-
mended to read both chapters. Time-series analysis and signal processing
are tightly linked. A solid knowledge of statistics is required to success-
fully work with these methods. However, the two chapters are more or
less independent from the previous chapters.

5. Chapter 7 and 8 – The second pair of chapters. From my experience,
reading both chapters makes a lot of sense. Processing gridded spatial
data and analyzing images has a number of similarities. Moreover, aerial