Local sensitivity analysis of heating degree day and cooling degree day temperature derivative prices

Abstract

We study the local sensitivity of heating degree day (HDD) and cooling degree day (CDD) temper-ature futures and option prices with respect to perturbations in the deseasonalized temperature or inone of its derivatives up to a certain order determined by the continuous-time autoregressive pro-cess modelling the deseasonalized temperature in the HDD and CDD indexes. We also consider anempirical case where a continuous-time process of autoregressive order 3 is fitted to New York tem-peratures and we perform a study of the local sensitivity of these financial contracts and a posterioranalysis of the results.