Evolutionary association rules for total ozone content modeling from satellite observations

In this paper we propose an evolutionary method of association rules discovery (EQAR, Evolutionary Quan titative Association Rules) that extends a recently published algorithm by the authors and we describe its ap plication to a problem of Total Ozone Content (TOC) modeling in the Iberian Peninsula. We use TOC data from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) on board the NASA Nimbus-7 satellite measured at three lo cations (Lisbon, Madrid and Murcia) of the Iberian Peninsula. As prediction variables for the association rules we consider several meteorological variables, such as Outgoing Long-wave Radiation (OLR), Temperature at 50 hPa level, Tropopause height, and wind vertical velocity component at 200 hPa. We show that the best as sociation rules obtained by EQAR are able to accurate modeling the TOC data in the three locations consid ered, providing results which agree to previous works in the literature