We can use the Decomposition or the Winters' method in Minitab to fit to the trends and seasonality in our data. It is generally recommended that we have at least four to five seasons in our data to be able to estimate seasonality.

Here, we will look at the results for temperature from the Oxford weather station. The data can be obtained from the Met Office website:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/.

The data is also provided in the Oxford weather (cleaned).mtw worksheet. We should expect a strong seasonal pattern for temperature. As the complete dataset starts in 1853, we will use a small subset for the period 2000 to 2013 for our purposes.

While we know that the seasonal variation has a 12 month pattern, we are going to verify this with autocorrelation. We will then compare the results using the Decomposition and Winters' method tools.

In earlier examples, we obtained the data directly from the Met Office website. For our convenience, we will...