2016 2nd International Conference on Next Generation Computing Technologies (NGCT-2016)
Dehradun, India 14-16 October 2016
Exploratory Data Analysis on Temperature Data
of Indian States from 1800-2013
(Analysis Of Trends In Temperature Data For Prediction Modelling)
Aditya Agrawal Dharvi Verma
Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of
Engineering, New Delhi, India Engineering,New Delhi, India
agrawal.aditya@outlook.com dharvi.verma.in@ieee.org
Abstract—Information about climate changes is required at
global, regional and basin levels for a variety of purposes,
including the study of impact of the greenhouse gases. The
analyses mentioned in this research relate to the observation of
trends in the temperatures of the Indian states. The research
begins with the exposition of the ongoing analysis methodologies
prevalent in exploratory analysis and prediction modeling on
temperature data. It further develops into the proposed work,
where the analysis of means of the average temperatures
observed across the Indian states from 1800-2013 is summarized,
which in turn is found to reveal confounding results. The
proposed work concludes with further focused analysis of
geographically similar states, namely the states lying on the Indo-
Gangetic plains, which reveal encouraging results, thereby
showing an occurrence of a trend. The research concludes with
the propounding of the future scope, which includes modeling for
predicting the average temperatures which can be attained over
the next few decades, which in turn would be significant for the
observation of the corollaries of global warming in India.
Keywords—exploratory analysis; indian states; temperature;
ggplot2; r; rstudio;
I. INTRODUCTION
There has been a sizeable uptick in warming and the threat
of Climate Change is more startling than it has ever been.
Scientists have performed exhaustive analyses and developed
prediction models to ascertain the rise in temperatures and
prognosticate how the trends will stand in the decades to
come. A huge amount of data to study climate change has
been collected for approximately a hundred and thirty years,
with researchers having laid down the very real hazard of
global warming using solid facts. Examination of Climate
Change trends entails a long-time evaluation of data, the
preparation of which is highly tricky. Collection, cleaning,
preprocessing of this data is complex, which is why survey of
this data needs to be very thorough. Mercury thermometers
were earlier used for collection, which in turn could give way
to dodgy results owing to any variations which could exist in
visit time. There was a shift to electronic thermometers in the
80s, which became a more reliable source of data collection.
This paper is based on the exploratory analysis of data
extracted from Berkeley Earth[1] to evaluate trends in
temperatures of Indian States from 1800-2013. Berkeley Earth
978-1-5090-3257-0/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
Shilpa Gupta
Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of
Engineering, New Delhi, India
shilpa.gupta@bharatividyapeeth.edu
is a non-profit organization, which analyzes Earth’s Surface
Temperature records and disseminates its scientific
investigations to shed light on the plight of global warming, by
addressing the concerns of the skeptics. Berkeley Earth’s
study on the surface temperatures of Earth consists of more
than 1.5 billion temperature reports. The data on global land
and ocean-and-land temperatures consists of records which
enlist statistics for the temperature recorded on the day of
measurement, such as, average temperature of land,
uncertainty over average land temperature, maximum and
minimum temperature, land-and-ocean average temperature
and its uncertainty. This facilitates an exhaustive analysis of
data which can aid in deciphering trends across regions or
group of regions.
Temperature data has been studied in the past to find the
underlying trends which could account for warming. Analyses
have been performed over the years to determine metrics such
as the highest increase in temperatures over a span of time,
regions contributing the most to an increase in the national
average temperature of a county, probability distribution
(normal, beta, uniform and exponential, etc.) of average
temperatures of a nation, correlation between the solar output
and the Earth’s surface temperatures, association between the
density and temperature of a country over the years to study
climate change trends, and tendencies in the average
temperature uncertainty over the years to check for noisy data,
et cetera.
The data extracted from Berkeley Earth was extremely
exhaustive, which allowed for fascinating subsets such as
those arranged by country or city, which in turn enabled an
interesting study on the average temperatures observed in the
states of India from 1800-2013. RStudio IDE [2], based on R
[3] was used for the analysis and the dataset with average
temperatures, and average temperature uncertainty grouped by
state was used to extract the data specific to India. Trends, if
any, existing in temperatures were analyzed for different
states. The trends in the temperatures across the states, over
the years, threw up some interesting results. Many states were
found to account for the warming trends in different years and
with varying degrees. The analysis of the current trends can
provide for a rigorous prediction model which in turn can
predict temperature trends for the coming years depending on
the available facts, figures and past patterns.
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2016 2nd International Conference on Next Generation Computing Technologies (NGCT-2016)
Dehradun, India 14-16 October 2016

The paper makes a case for the exploratory data analysis of

the temperature data, for the states of India from 1800-2013.
After an emphasis on the related work in this domain, the
problem statement has been described thoroughly. The fourth
section highlights the proposed work and provides illustrations
to corroborate the trends mentioned in the section. This is
followed by a section underscoring the future scope of this
analysis to extend its capabilities and thereby derive a huge
number of exploitable results. The paper is concluded with a
summarization of the analysis performed, the trends exhibited
and the irregularities observed. A proposal for the
development of a sound prediction model is then advocated.

II. RELATED WORKS

A. Analyzing the Average Annual Temperature Increase for

every city over the 1800-2013 period

Implemented by Ben Watson[4], this methodology

analyzes the average annual increase in temperature for each
month for every city on the planet from 1800-2013. The
dataset in which global temperatures were arranged according
to cities was selected, some data points were created and meta-
data sets of each city were taken. Data table was created using
the package data.table [5] to facilitate quicker subsetting.
Maps were plotted to show the trends for every month. This
methodology provides highly informative and systematic
visuals. Analyzing twelve graphs, one can ascertain the
climatic trends across various regions of the world, and derive
conclusions according to the problem statement.
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show the average annual increase, as a
sample, in temperature for the months of January and June, as
plotted by Ben Watson for his analysis of the dataset.
Fig. 2. Average Annual Temperature Increase in June
B. Analyzing the change in land temperature
Implemented by J. Alejandro Gelves[6], this methodology
maps the change in land temperature for different regions. He
has selected the dataset of global temperatures by state and
chosen the United States for analysis of change in land
temperature in continental US. The author groups the data by
year to find average temperature for each year. The author
organized the data into data frames and obtained the
choropleth maps for the years 1850 and 2013.
Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 were obtained by J. Alejandro Gelves.
Fig. 3 illustrates the choropleth map of land temperatures for
different states of US in year 1850.

Fig. 1. Average Annual Temperature Increase in January

Fig. 3. Land Temperatures in some states of USA in 1850

Fig. 4 Choropleth map of land temperatures for

different states of US in year 2013 .

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2016 2nd International Conference on Next Generation Computing Technologies (NGCT-2016)
Dehradun, India 14-16 October 2016
Fig. 4. Land Temperatures in some states of USA in 2013
C. Methodology to detect monotonic trends in annual average
temperatures using Mann-Kendall test
Manohar Arora et al investigated trends in temperature
time series of 125 stations spread across India [7]. The
Mann-Kendall test, which is a non-parametric test used to
assess monotonic upward and downward trends, was
applied. Mean, mean maximum and mean minimum were
the variables considered for analysis, which was carried
out on both annual temperatures and seasonal
temperatures. The seasonal analysis, by which every year
was divided into four seasons namely, pre-monsoon,
monsoon, post-monsoon and winter, allowed for a study of
trends observed in each season for every parameter. Trends
such as annual trends, regional trends, seasonal trends and
percentage of significant trends, etc. were examined.
D. Analysis of trends in temperature using Artificial Neural
Network
The climate change data is often irregular and non-linear in
nature. This has led to the application of Artificial Neural
Network to aid in the analysis of weather data and the
development of reliable non-linear predictive models, by
K. Abhishek et al[8]. The structural relationships between
different entities were demonstrated using the features of
the artificial neural networks which in turn facilitates an
effective analysis of trends existing in temperature data as
well as the setup of an efficient weather forecasting model.
III. PROBLEM STATEMENT
Analysis of the trends of temperatures occurring across India
has been a common question for the researchers, but few
researches have been focused on finding trends with the aim
of predicting the average temperatures which will be prevalent
in the next few decades. The analysis of geographically
similar regions can evince significant results which will play a
major role in the prediction of average temperatures that will
be attained in these regions. These predictions will help in
gauging the rate at which the climate is heating up in these
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regions, which in turn will help in predicting the impact of the
greenhouse gases as well as provide the stimulus for the
countermeasures required for palliating the effects of global
warming. These analyses and prediction models will also lay
down a pathway for similar research on other geographically
related areas.
IV. PROPOSED WORK
The work proposed in this analysis takes inspiration from the
work done by J. Alejandro Gelves[6]. The data that was
obtained from Berkeley Earth was put through preprocessing
procedures, which yielded the complete dataset of Indian
states. The dplyr[9] package was instrumental in the
processing of the data and also in further analysis. The
processed data that was finally obtained contained the
following fields:
1. Date: String value of date which ranged from 1st of
every month of 1796 to the 1st of every month of
2013.
2. AverageTemperature: Average land temperature in
Celsius.
3. AverageTemperatureUncertainty: Provides the 95%
confidence interval around the average temperature
(AverageTemperature). Gives a measure of the
uncertainty.
4. State: Gives the name of the state of India for which
data is provided.
5. Country: This field is constant and set to the string
value of ‘India’.
This dataset was put through further processing scripts for
obtaining the Date value in numeric format with separate
fields for Date, Month, and Year; as the Date value were
earlier contained in string format. This processing was done
using the tidyr[10] package for the RStudio, where the
separate() function was used for performing the above task
efficiently. The data in the obtained format contained 81,620
row entries over 7 column fields, i.e. Date, Month, Year,
Average Temperature, AverageTemperatureUncertainty, State
and Country.
Upon further inspection of the data, using the unique function
of Base-R package, it was revealed that the number of states
being accounted for in the data was 34, which included the 28
states (there were 28 states at the time of collection/estimation
of data) and 6 Union Territories, namely - Chandigarh, Dadra
and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Pondicherry, Andaman
And Nicobar, and Delhi. It was decided as some of the Union
Territories do not occupy significant landmass and will not
contribute significantly to the analysis, they were deemed as
redundant.
All the Union Territories, except Delhi, were removed from
the dataset for the sake of a focused analysis. Filter function
of the dplyr[9] package was used for the above removal of the
Union Territories. All the above procedures, in conjunction,
yielded the final processed data for analysis.
2016 2nd International Conference on Next Generation Computing Technologies (NGCT-2016)
Dehradun, India 14-16 October 2016

A. Analysis of the data for 29 states (including Delhi)

The data obtained after the above procedures, was pipelined

through a series of functions, provided by dplyr package that
served the following functionalities:

1. Filter: for filtering the data before 1800 out of the

provided dataset and obtaining the data from 1800-
2013.
2. Group_by: for grouping of the data on the basis of
the years, which is required for the summarise
function.
3. Summarise: this function was used for summarizing
the mean of the AverageTemperature of the states for
a year into a new field variable, named Temp.
Summarise function applies the similar procedure on Fig. 6. Average Temperature of India at interval of 50 Years.
every group provided by the group_by function and
thus a list means for every year was obtained into the B. Analysis of the data for states around the Indo-Gangetic
field Temp. region (including Delhi)

The Temp variable and the years were plotted using the qplot
function of the ggplot2[11] package, for R Studio. The scatter
and line plot, Fig 5, show a visible dip in the average
temperatures of the Indian states under consideration. This dip
was deemed as an oddity in analysis, mostly accounted to the
huge diversity in the states of India, which range from the sub-
freezing temperatures of Jammu-Kashmir, to the extremely
hot conditions prevalent in Rajasthan. Further, the root-mean-
square value of the deviations for the period of 1800~1850
will evidently be very high as compared to the rest of the plot.
The boxplots that were obtained for the interval of 50 years
i.e. for years – 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2000 also revealed
similar results. Discrete values of mean temperatures of the
states for the respective year have been considered for the
box-plot, which will be further analyzed to consider mean
values of a period of years. This analysis visual was also
obtained in a similar manner using the qplot function of
ggplot2 package.
Inconsequential results were obtained from the analysis of all
the states of India that was correlated with the diversity of
India, where significant change in any particular geographical
region caused a change in the averaging of all the
geographical regions taken as unity. To eradicate the chaining
effect of changes in different geographic systems, the research
was focused on the analysis of a particular geographically
similar region, namely- the states in the Indo-Gangetic region.
The following states were decided for further focus of the
analysis- Delhi, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh,
Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. Filter
function was used for filtering out the data of the
aforementioned states from the data of all the states of India,
as used in previous section.

Fig. 7. Average Temperature of states of Indo-Gangetic region (1800-2013).

Fig. 5. India Average Temperature (1800-2013).

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2016 2nd International Conference on Next Generation Computing Technologies (NGCT-2016)
Dehradun, India 14-16 October 2016
The pipelining of the thus obtained data from the series of
functions, as done earlier, was repeated, i.e. - the data was
filtered, grouped by, and then summarized using the functions
filter, group_by, and summarise.
The qplot of the data obtained in a similar manner to that done
for all the states of India revealed encouraging results and a
regular trend, as shown below. Fig 7 points in the direction of
a trend in the increase of the average temperatures of the states
which belong to the Indo-Gangetic region, which share many
geographical characteristics. The root-mean-square values of
the scatter plot around the trend-line would also be less, as the
average temperature readings are condensed around a uniform
trend.
This exploratory analysis of the data of the states around the
Indo-Gangetic region was further improved and depicted in a
plot of the boxplots of the average temperatures at an interval
of 40 years, for the period of 1800-2000. The box-plots
consider single values of all the occurring mean temperatures
for the states in the particular year, as depicted by the abscissa.
Further analyses are proposed for the future, which will
provide comprehensive detail by accounting for mean values
for a time span of a few decades. The work done by David A.
Abdo et al [12], S. Kundu et al [13] and A.Ghosh et al [14]
inspired us in the search of these trends.
The boxplots visible in the Fig 8 also point in the same
direction, as done by the scatter-line plot of the average
temperatures of the states around the Indo-Gangetic region.
These plots show the potential of the development of a
suitable prediction model, which will be capable of predicting
the average temperatures of these states, which will be in
conjunction with the rise depicted in the given plots.
Fig. 8. Average Temperature of Indo-Gangetic region at interval of 40 years.
(1800-2000).
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This analyses allows the scope of prediction of future
temperature recordings which will have wide-ranging impact
on the way the rise in temperatures is viewed, as a disastrous
increase will need to be avoided and if the prediction model
predicts such catastrophic temperatures, then measures would
need to be adopted for thwarting the occurrence of the same.
V. FUTURE SCOPE
The analysis of the states around the Indo-Gangetic plains
reveals a steady rise in the means of the averages of the
temperatures across these states, namely – Delhi, Bihar, Uttar
Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand,
and West Bengal, over the years, from 1800-2013.
This trend can be mapped onto a linear regression model,
or other apposite prediction model can be developed which
will provide us with the probable average temperatures that
these regions can encounter over the next few decades. This
will facilitate the study of temperature trends, which may
occur in the plains of India. It will help in gauging the impact
of global warming and foment countermeasures for checking
the same. Further study over the same would be done for
provisioning the average temperature range that these states
would face during the decade of 2040-2050.
These analyses can also be carried out over other
geographically similar areas, which will further provide
similar or improved insights, as are being observed from the
Indo-Gangetic states in India, for studying and researching
into the information which can be provisioned from the
available data.
VI. CONCLUSION
The above research studies the methodologies prevalent
for the modeling of the temperature trends, from the wrangled
temperature data and also provides analyses of the temperature
trends which were prevalent in specific geographically similar
regions of India, during the period of 1800-2013. Different
regions, owing to different geography and different
environmental conditions show different changes in
temperature data, with some regions facing the brunt of global
warming more than others. Similar analysis of the average
temperatures of all the states of India, taken as a whole, did
not allow for reasonable analysis of trends. But, the visualized
temperature data of the Indo-Gangetic regions exhibited trends
which allow the scope for modeling, which will further the
scope of this research and allow for the development of
suitable prediction model for predicting the average
temperatures for certain regions of India. Such a model could
aid in outlining the major regions where the maximum
increase in temperature may be observed, which would in turn
yield in scientific research on the specific causes and the
consequences of the said increase. Study of trends which may
occur in the future could be used as an effective tool to further
scientific literature in the domain of climate change.
2016 2nd International Conference on Next Generation Computing Technologies (NGCT-2016)
Dehradun, India 14-16 October 2016

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