UNST 125g Winter 2016 Historical Climate Records Part I: Temperature Due Date: Monday February 8", via d2L dropbox, Objectives: This assignment is intended to give you: 1) a look at some relatively long- term climate data relative to the book we are reading, The Worst Hard Time (Egan, 2006); 2) some practice with basic spreadsheet functions; 3) some practice making and interpreting graphs; and 4) further opportunity to flex your mental muscles, to ponder, question and hypothesize. Grading: This assignment will be graded on: 1) Completion; 2) Graph aesthetics and overall neatness; and 3) Depth (not to be confused with correctness) of your observations, questions, and hypotheses. Turn in only the Word document with embedded graphs created in Excel. This assignment is worth 5% of your final grade. Introduction Itthis exercise, we will examine temperature records from one of the towns in The Worst Hard Time (Egan, 2006) and from other sites of your choosing. You are asked to download long-term climate records, import them into an Excel workbook, perform some simple calculations and make graphs of the data. At the end of this document you will find numbered questions that are intended to assist you in studying the data sets. You should answer the questions using complete sentences and short paragraphs. Where the question asks for a plot from your data analysis, print the graph, number it, and refer to that number in your answer. It is important in this analysis to remember the difference between climate and weather, as well as the spatial variability in climate that we have discussed in lecture. It is often useful to compare the trends you discover at a particular site to regional or global trends. The Data Please use a web browser to open the website at http://data giss.nasa gov/gistemp/station_data/ Ifyou seroll down, you'll see an interactive map. If you click anywhere on the map, a window of regional climate stations will pop up, arranged by distance from where you clicked on the map. The list shows the coordinates of each station, the population of the surrounding town, and the years on record. You may select any two sites you wish that have temperature records that go back at least to the 1920s..and at least up until 2011...Except Boise City, which we'll use as an example, A graph will pop up showing Average Mean Temperatures for each year of record. Below this, click on “Download monthly data as text”; a window with a lot of data will open, Save this to your desktop (note it may by default simply save it as “station.txt”; you’ll be saving others, so give it a suitable name, like “Boise City.txt”. Now, open the file in Excel. Remember, you'll need to tell Excel to look for “All files” or “text files”; also you may have to use “fixed-width” to open it such that each column of numbers occupies a single column in the Excel worksheet,What you'll see when you open the file is a column of calendar years, then average monthly values, then seasonal average values: D-J-F (December-January-February) for the northern hemisphere winter season; M-A-M (March-April-May) for spring; J-J-A (June-July-August) for summer; and S-O-N (September-October-November) for fall. Some cells may have “999.9”. This indicates that no data is available for that observation interval. The column on the far right is the annual average temperature (in degrees Celsius); this and the calendar year column are what we'll be using. You may open a given file and find huge data gaps that are just too big to deal with; in this case, pick another location Asan example, we'll work through the data from Boise City. I'll post the results from this on d2L so you'll have a template. If you wish, you can readily move each sheet to the same Excel Workbook that contains the Boise City data; just click on the tab at the bottom of the worksheet. This will bring up a menu. Choose “Move or Copy Worksheet” and then select the Workbook you wish to move or copy the worksheet to. If you choose, you can copy and paste the existing graphs and then use “Select Data” to remove the old data and add new data. Calculations: Temperature Anomalies and Running Means First, get rid of each “999.9” in the “metANN” column. You can just manually delete these, leaving blank cells, if you choose. However, there is a less labor-intensive way, using an “If-then” statement to either copy the value or put a blank in the case of “999.9” in the next column too, We'll go over this in class. Now, calculate “running means” (also called a “moving average”). A running mean isa series of mean values calculated along the data set using subsets of the data. Running means are helpful here because they smooth out some of the year-to-year noise that can. make plots of annual data hard to interpret. There are several ways to go about this (e.g., averaging proceeding values or following values) and one can use different periods of time. You will take 5-year averages centered on the given year for which you are calculating a value. Simply create a new column and use “=average(x1:y1)” where “x1” is the mean annual temperature two years prior to the row you're on and “y1” is the mean annual temperature two years in the future from the row you're on. There are blanks in the data you're averaging. We'll allow for two missing data points (out of 5) for our running average. This will allow you to calculate a running average from the beginning to the end of the data set and where there are two missing data points together. However, for the Boise City data, there will be a 9-year gap between 1953 and 1959 which will have too many (> 2) holes and should be left blank. Also, you wouldn’t calculate a running average for the first or last row of data (for which there would be two blanks). Finally, we want to calculate a “temperature anomaly” — that is the difference between each year’s annual average and a long-term average. In keeping with the World Meteorological Society’s standards, the long-term average we will use to make such a comparison is the single average value calculated only from the years 1951-1980. Youmay wish to insert a row at the top. To do so, go to main menu, click “Insert”> “Rows”. On the top cell of column $ or T, type “=average(xx:xx)” except the xx:xx should be the range of mean annual temperatures between 1951-1980 (e.g., R46:R75). Note the resulting values are not actual measured temperatures, but rather the difference in degrees from the average of 1951-1980 temperatures (or in this particular case, 1960-1980), which will be “0”. You should also put in one last column of 5-year running averages of the temperature anomalies. Choose Two Other Cities of Your Choice from the GISS Website When you have completed this for Boise City, go back to the map and pick any two other sites you wish that have temperature records that go back at least to the 1920s and extend until at least 2011. You may open some and find data gaps that are just too big to deal with; in this case, pick another location. Make the same calculations vou do for Boise City. You can readily move each sheet to the same Excel Workbook that contains the Boise City data; just click on the tab at the bottom of the worksheet. This will bring up a menu, Choose “Move or Copy Worksheet” and then select the Workbook you wish to move or copy the worksheet to. Graphs Note: Figures you produce should have labels for all axes, a title, a legend, and should be easy to read. Export the charts to a Word document and give them numbered captions. 1. Make plots of the five year running mean annual temperature (not anomaly) your cities of choice; you can eliminate the marker points and simply use lines. Please include both cities on one chart for temperature. Be sure to take the time to make charts that are easy to read. (a) What is the hottest year on record in each of the sites and how hot was it in each city that year? (Because you're plotting averages, you won’t be able to get the temperatures directly off the chart (except for Boise City), but can use the chart to point you to which row of data you should look at). (b) What are the benefits and problems (pros and cons) of using running means? 2. Make a mean annual temperature anomaly plot for the three towns. This series should plot directly over the previous series (it’s the same data!), but be a different color. We'll use this for part 3 below. (a) Were the 1930s anomalously warm compared to the 1920s in both your locations? (b) Compare the temperature anomalies since the 1950s (ie., from 1960 on) in both cities. Do you see any trends in the data? Are they the same overall in each location? (c) What are the pros and ‘cons of using temperature anomalies? It may well be that you do not see the same trends over the same time period. The differences arise due to the coupled interactions of all the processes that define climate. I encourage you to speculate as to why differences exists between particular locations. The differences also suggest why single site data are not the best data for examining a global climate phenomenon. For that, we need data averaged among many locations. . . Part II.