Data mining is the process of extracting nontrivial and potentially useful information, or knowlege, from the enormous data sets available in experimental sciences (historical records, reanalysis, GCM simulations, etc.), providing explicit information that has a readable form and can be used to solve diagnosis, classification or forecasting problems. Traditionally, these problems were solved by direct hands-on data analysis using standard statistical methods, but the increasing volume of data has motivated the study of automatic data analysis using more complex and sophisticated tools which can operate directly from data. Thus, data mining identifies trends within data that go beyond simple analysis. Modern data mining techniques (association rules, decision trees, Gaussian mixture models, regression algorithms, neural networks, support vector machines, Bayesian networks, etc.) are used in many domains to solve association, classification, segmentation, diagnosis and prediction problems