Thursday, September 25, 2014

Databases Galore - 3

Yesterday I said "(I plan to do two today to make up for it" but I did not get around to it because of some unexpected disruptions.

The best laid plans of mice and men eh?

I did finish one additional program this morning.

It accepts a "country id code" composed of three digits, then contacts the mySQL Server which collects the data from all weather stations in that specified country, then the program prints out a report on each weather station for each year available at that location.

For example, I printed out the info for the U.S. and that one report ended up having 514,535 lines of text (1,921 stations).

Today's post will concern a smaller country with fewer weather stations (only 7) so it will fit in a single post, and will give the gist of what a report looks like:

[UPDATE: I updated the dizzying numbers(1000 lines plus) with the following graphs of the country and its 7 stations]

There are a couple of things about the graphs I should explain, now that the individual numbers that were here are no longer here.

The year 2014 only has data available through August.

So those figures may gyrate from the norm.
Click on any graph to get a larger view of it.Later today, I may add an option to the program so it will print in HTML table format.

Note that these 7 stations are in different locations in Burkina Faso, and that they don't begin with the same year because some are older.
Looking at the data is an education in geography as well as some fundamentals of climate science, which is collecting and storing accurate and usable data.

We citizens on our own can find out about and take interest in the things that matter.
Plus, it allows us to have less "faith / trust" due to having personal experience and knowledge on the issue (The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?).

This data has not been smoothed or rounded so there are jumps where data are missing for several months (wars, disasters, etc. at a station).
Thanks to the scientists who have made it available to us.

It gives new meaning to "don't try this at home" because it does not take a rocket scientist to make databases and convert the data to graphs.

We can see it for ourselves.
Meanwhile, back in DC, some are dancing to the war drums on a "deth starr" while others are listening to the music of the Earth.

The music is alarming because making war while our environment dies is tempting destruction on two fronts.

The death stars are killing the Earth with little to no remorse as it turns out (Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment - 3).

The words at the beginning of the song "Deth Starr" (video below) tell of the dangers facing civilization, yet the most important thing of all to them is building weapons of mass destruction.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

"Listen To The Music", by The Doobie Brothers

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"Deth Starr", by Tenacious D



4 comments:

  1. What I need from all this is the northernmost readings from as many longitudes as possible. I especially need them around the beginning of August, so I can watch closely through the ice melting season and adjust my bets in prediction markets accordingly...

    Also, you can probably get more out of this than I can:

    > realtime data from SWIFT buoys is available here: http://faculty.washington.edu/jmt3rd/SWIFTdata/DynamicDataLinks.html

    They're working on an app for that, hopefully soon.

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    Replies
    1. Scott,

      The SWIFT data (Surface Wave Instrument Float with Tracking) seems to be very well designed and comprehensive for studying Pacific Waves (which are for the most part expressions of wind action on water).

      I recall one very interesting application of ocean buoys on the East Coast off Virginia.

      Long story short it exposed some of the deniers when the buoys revealed a 1.5 foot sea level rise and the deniers passed laws making it illegal to say the ocean can rise more than 8 inches (Will This Float Your Boat - 3).

      Concerning your interest "the northernmost readings from as many longitudes as possible", some of the database links I posted recently contain a database that seperates the readings into northern and southern latitudes.

      I am not at my programming site but will post that in a comment when I get there.

      In the mean time here is one NASA readme.txt that explains one program for northern climes (README.txt).

      I have already downloaded the databases for both northern and southern latitudes at about 10 different locations (different longtitudes and latitudes) so I will put a later message up that has the like to the freely downloadable data.

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    2. Here is a page that has, among other things, "Northern Hemisphere-mean monthly, seasonal, and annual means, 1880-present, updated through most recent month" (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/).

      I would be cautious for some time about ice extent in the Arctic. It is dying. So it is thrashing about. It is casting off cold as it dies. What is consistent is the loss of volume as the ice extent has some erratic spells.

      Once the ice melts and the cold has been cast off (like the recent cold spells and cooling in the U.S. and Canada), all hell will literally break loose.

      How long it takes the Arctic Ice to die out is uncertain, but ice loss is not only continual, it is accelerating (How Fifth Graders Calculate Ice Volume - 5). This will generate some cold spells like a fan does when it blows over the cool air above a melting block of ice (like early air conditioning).

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  2. Hi! I've been following your website for a while
    now and finally got the bravery to go ahead and give you a shout out from Humble Tx!

    Just wanted to say keep up the excellent work!

    ReplyDelete