Includes bibliography and index.

Introduction
Literature review
Fitting Markov chain models using instat and marksim
Genstat command interface
Markov modeling of climatic data in genstat
Results and discussion
Conclusion and further work

Despite the rapid development of statistical packages, a lot of climatic data still remain unanalyzed due to lack of specialized routines in most of the packages. One package has a climatic menu though with limitation on complex analysis such as generalized linear models. Others can perform the Generalized Linear Model analysis but do not have a specialized menu for analyzing climatic data. There is no statistical package currently available which has a specialized capability to do climatic analysis easily and includes the use of generalized linear models. This study starts the work of creating a specialized menu in GenStat for analyzing climatic data by implementing Markov modeling of rainfall data. Four procedures have been written and corresponding dialogues were created to ease their use. Incorporating a climatic menu into GenStat package will support researchers in agricultural and many other fields that need an analysis of climatic data as part of their work.