Testing for Climate Change: Evolutionary Dynamics of Precipitation in Atlantic, Canada

Yuri Yevdokimov¹, and Sergiy Kosenchuk²

1. Department of Economics, University of New Brunswick, Canada

2. Western University, London, Canada

Abstract: Recent economic literature provides rigorous econometric evidence that climate change impacts such as increase in temperature, change in precipitation patterns, extreme weather events and others have significant effects on eco­nomic activity such as productivity, value added, total output and others. While some of them like increasing temperature definitely lead to negative economic consequences which is documented in recent literature, the impact of others and first of all precipitation is not that clear. In our study, we analyze literature dedicated to empirical evidence of the changing dynamics of precipitation and develop our own methodology on the basis of parametric time series analysis. We apply our methodology to study structural regime changes in dynamics of snowfall and rainfall time series associated with five regional road transportation hubs in Atlantic Canada since 1870s. As a result, we detected structural breaks in these series that can be explained by the climate change.

 Key words: climate change, precipitation, econometrics, time series analysis, regional dynamics