310 Assignment #2

F/RS 310

Assignment #2

Introduction to the analysis of long-term climate data

50 Points

 

NOTE: An example of what your final product should look like can be found at the bottom of this assignment description.

Objective: The climate characteristics of a region impact the types of plants that can grow in the region and also has implications for the function and services ecosystems can provide.  Therefore, being able to determine the climate characteristics is important for understanding different ecosystems.  In additional, communicating the key climate characteristics to stakeholders can be important in working with a wide range of interests.  The objective of this assignment is to introduce you to the Excel commands and functions that you will need in order to summarize and plot climate data so that you can determine the climate characteristics of any region in the world and communicate these results through graphical figures.

Student Learning Objectives: When you are finished you should be able to:

1) Find and download climate data from the ClimDB website

2) Open comma delimited files (files with a ‘.csv’ extension) in Excel

3) Calculate ‘subtotals’ in order to summarize climate data

4) Reformat date information in Excel

5) Create and modify line plots in Excel that include multiple data sets on a single panel.

 

Due date: Bring a hard copy to submit during your lab #2

Tuesday Lab: turn in during lab on Jan. 26

Thursday Lab: turn in during lab on Jan. 28

 

Rubric:

In order to get the full points for this assignment you will need to:

1) Download a climate data set that is at least 15 years long from ClimDB (10 points)

2) Calculate the annual mean daily min, mean, and max (15 points)

3) Create a line graph to show the annual mean, minimum, and maximum daily temperatures

  1. a) All three lines must be on the same panel. Each should be a different color
  2. b) You must have a legend defining the three lines (5 points)
  3. c) Your x- and y-axis labels must read (10 points)

x – ‘Year’

y – ‘Temperature [C]’

  1. d) You must have a title on your graph that lists (10 points):
  • The station name/ location (state) where the data in your graph was collected.
  • The number of years in the dataset you used for the assignment.

 

Example of what your final product should look like