A new method for detecting undocumented discontinuities in climatological time series

Abstract The development of homogeneous climatological time series is a crucial step in examining climate fluctuations and change. We review and test methods that have been proposed previously for detecting inhomogeneities, and introduce a new method we have developed. This method is based on a combination of regression analysis and non‐parametric statistics. After evaluation against other techniques, using both simulated and observed data, our technique appears to have the best overall performance.