Modeling asymmetric volatility in weekly Dutch temperature data

In addition to clear-cut seasonality in mean and variance, weekly Dutch temperature data appear to have a strong asymmetry in the impact of unexpectedly high or low temperatures on conditional volatility. Furthermore, this asymmetry also shows fairly pronounced seasonal variation. To describe these features, we propose a univariate seasonal time series model with asymmetric conditionally heteroskedastic errors. We fit this (and other, nested) model(s) to 25 years of weekly data. We evaluate its forecasting performance for 5 years of hold-out data and find that the imposed asymmetry leads to better out-of-sample forecasts of temperature volatility. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.