Abstract: A novel interval quartering algorithm (IQA) is proposed to overcome insufficiency of the conventional singular spectrum analysis (SSA) iterative interpolation for selecting parameters including the number of the principal components and the embedding dimension. Based on the improved SSA iterative interpolation, interpolated test and comparative analysis are carried out to the outgoing longwave radiation daily data. The results show that IQA can find globally optimal parameters to the error curve with local oscillation, and has advantage of fast computing speed. The improved interpolation method is effective in the interpolation of missing data.

Key words: singular spectrum analysis, outgoing longwave radiation, interpolation of missing data, interval quartering algorithm