Application of random walk to model temperature in 60 African cities for the 20th century

Abstract

The 20th century is marked with climate change led by global warming. So far, many models have been applied to analyze the temperature change. However, a simple but interesting model, a random walk is hardly used in his regard. In this study, we use the random walk to model the temperature in the format of random walk that is the conversion of recorded temperature and the real recorded temperature in 60 African cities including 53 capitals for the 20th century. The results show that the random walk can satisfyingly model either temperature in the format of random walk or real recorded temperature although the fitted results from other climate models are unavailable for comparison in these 60 cities. As nothing else besides random numbers is involved in this modelling, the results seem somewhat counter-intuitively.