Record what each climate index is measured in - #24
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The catalog gave every index a label and a description but no units, so nothing said that AMOC is in Sverdrups while NAO is in standard deviations. In a table of model coefficients those look comparable and are not. AMOC Sv AMO degrees C NAO standardized anomaly AO standardized anomaly PDO standardized anomaly LCR fraction The standardized ones say so rather than being left blank or called dimensionless. "Unitless" would be true and useless; what a reader needs to know is that the number is in standard deviations, which is why a coefficient fitted to it means something different. Assigned from the data rather than from memory: AMO ranges about -0.2 to 0.5 with sd 0.15 over 2000-2010, which is degrees C, while PDO ranges about -2 to 2 with sd 0.93, which is standardized. The two look similar in a catalog listing and are not the same kind of number. Surfaced in index_dictionary(), in its printed output, and in the README table alongside the record each index covers. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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The catalog gave every index a label and a description but no units, so nothing said that
AMOCis in Sverdrups whileNAOis in standard deviations. In a table of model coefficients those look comparable and are not.AMOCAMONAO/AO/PDOLCRThe standardized ones say so rather than being left blank or called dimensionless. "Unitless" would be true and useless; what a reader needs to know is that the number is in standard deviations, which is exactly why a coefficient fitted to it means something different from one fitted to
AMOC.Assigned from the data, not from memory
The two that could plausibly have been either were checked against the published series over 2000–2010:
They look similar in a catalog listing and are not the same kind of number.
Where it shows
index_dictionary()gains aunitscolumn and prints it:The README table gains a Units column alongside the record each index covers, with a note that only
AMOandAMOCcarry physical units.Verification
2 new tests: every index declares units (so a new one cannot be added without them), and units reach both the dictionary data frame and its printed output.
R CMD check— Status: OK. Full suite green. Installed into both R 4.6.1 and 4.3.2.🤖 Generated with Claude Code