What is a Taylor Diagram

Author: Kunal Konar, Consultant (Business Development & Analytic Hydrology)

Note: This post was first appeared in LinkedIn about 7 years ago.

Taylor Diagram was invented by a scientist named K. E. Taylor at Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Inter-comparison Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California.

It is an elegant visual aid to assess the efficacy of any method which produces more than one modeled time series for a single observed time series. A Taylor Diagram is capable of portraying the match between the observed series and a model series in time domain as well as in frequency domain. It shows two time based indices namely, correlation coefficient and centered RMS difference and one frequency based index namely, standard deviation, in a single plot.

An example Taylor Diagram is appended for curious reader.

Figure-1: Comparison of two Different Bias Corrected TRMM Time Series with the Raw TRMM Time Series

Note:

• TRMM: Tropical Radar Meteorology Mission; more information may be found here.

• Read original article by Taylor himself here. Good news is this a free-access article.