You also have this week to finish up the remaininder of Part II of Homework 4

The central england temperature record is a set of fairly reliable temperature measurments for this region going back to 1659. Its the longest reliable temperature record of any region in the world.

In Part 1 of this exercise will deal with just part of this data, from 1878 to present.

This assignment is not all that demanding. There are two input data files and in a single program you should be able to process these input files to meet the requirements of the assignment. This is what progamming is about, after all!

Steps:


  1. Download the following two data sets. These are both .txt files.



    The format is pretty simple. The first column is the year and the subsequent 12 columns are monthly averages in degrees C.

  2. Smooth both the maximum and minimum data using:

    • box car (moving average) of width 5 years
    • Gaussian kernel of width 7 years
    • Exponential smoothing


  3. Plot all three smoothing waveforms on the same graph and comment on any differences that you notice in smoothing procedure. Note - for purposes of display please make an output graphic file that is approximately 11000 pixels long so this can be displayed on the vizwall on Friday

  4. Gaming the result:

    Climate data is often plotted a temperature anamoly where individual temperatures are compared to some "baseline". That is, over some time period, the average January Max temperature is X and if say an individual January had max temperature of X +0.5 then that would be an anamoly of +0.5.

    For example, in this case a baseline of 30 years is used (1961-1990) for annual temperatues:



    The choice of baseline, however, is arbitrary.

    Produce a temprature anomaly plot by using two different baselines for each of the two data sets. Baseline 1 is 30 years long (1961-1990); baseline 2 is 100 years long (1880-1980).

  5. Now, why do we want to learn how to program? Well, so we can cheat. There is likely some baseline length which will produce the maximum positive temperature anomalies over say the last 10 years. Then, using that baseline, we can write a paper about global warming.

    Therefore, write a program that uses random beginnings and endings of baseline period (minimum time of 30 years) that will maximize the average temperature anamoly over the period 2007-2016. Do this for both the minimum and maximum temp data and indicated your choice of baseline. Also comment on whether you see a stronger effect in the Max or the Min data.