PhD Thesis, 2010 - University College Cork

Material and methods
6. The average 30-min fluxes are calculated along with the number of
adjacent statistical parameters from u, v, w, c and T time series and their
permutations.
7. A stationarity test based on Foken and Wichura (1996) is then carried out,
using pre-calculated 5-min averaged flux values to test for the atmospheric
stationarity during half-hourly period. In case the stationarity condition was
not upheld, the 30-min flux value was discarded and was considered a gap
in the time series. The gaps associated with this stage of algorithm have to
do with atmospheric conditions.
Despite the different nature of the gaps in the time series of instantaneous 30-min
averaged flux, in our analysis all gaps were treated similarly, since no further
information could be extracted from unknown values.
The programmatical implementation done in Python programming language was
flexible enough to vary most of the presented parameters and values, even if it was not
required in the final version of the analysis. The code is included into the Appendix 2
for reference.
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