This book is the first volume of the International Series in Economic Model ing, a series designed to summarize current issues and procedures in applied modeling within various fields of economics and to offer new or alternative approaches to prevailing problems. In selecting the subject area for the first volume, we were attracted by the area to which applied modeling efforts are increasingly being drawn, regional economics and its associated subfields. Applied modeling is a broad rubric even when the focus is restricted to econometric modeling issues. Regional econometric modeling has posted a record of rapid growth during the last two decades and has become an established field of research and application. Econometric models of states and large urban areas have become commonplace, but the existence of such models does not signal an end to further development of regional econ ometric methods and models. Many issues such as structural specification, level of geographic detail, data constraints, forecasting integrity, and syn thesis with other regional modeling techniques will continue to be sources of concern and will prompt further research efforts. The chapters of this volume reflect many of these issues. A brief synopsis of each contribution is provided below: Richard Weber offers an overview of regional econometric models by discussing theoretical specification, nature of variables, and ultimate useful ness of such models. For an illustration, Weber describes the specification of the econometric model of New Jersey.

Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences, Third Edition, explains the latest statistical methods used to describe, analyze, test, and forecast atmospheric data. This revised and expanded text is intended to help students understand and communicate what their data sets have to say, or to make sense of the scientific literature in meteorology, climatology, and related disciplines. In this new edition, what was a single chapter on multivariate statistics has been expanded to a full six chapters on this important topic. Other chapters have also been revised and cover exploratory data analysis, probability distributions, hypothesis testing, statistical weather forecasting, forecast verification, and time series analysis. There is now an expanded treatment of resampling tests and key analysis techniques, an updated discussion on ensemble forecasting, and a detailed chapter on forecast verification. In addition, the book includes new sections on maximum likelihood and on statistical simulation and contains current references to original research. Students will benefit from pedagogical features including worked examples, end-of-chapter exercises with separate solutions, and numerous illustrations and equations. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the atmospheric sciences, including meteorology, climatology, and other geophysical disciplines. Accessible presentation and explanation of techniques for atmospheric data summarization, analysis, testing and forecasting Many worked examples End-of-chapter exercises, with answers provided