Monday, September 30, 2019

Tobacco Growth Concerns

My tobacco plants are growing like weeds, of which I'm relatively certain that tobacco is one. I've been concerned that the cooling temperatures here in San Diego will impede their growth as their metabolism slows. Looking up optimum temperatures for the little brutes, I discovered that it likes it between 68 and 86.

From that temperature range, I'm guessing numerology plays a large role in tobacco metaphysics.

In any case, I've decided to reprise my rainfall experiment and will now be tracking hourly temperatures here, with the help of Weather Underground. WU gives you access to past data, which will make things all the easier as I don't have a data collection setup for temperatures and I'm too lazy to make one.

WU provides you with a lovely table. Written in javascript. So you can't easily scrape it with Simple HTML DOM Parser.

Dang.

Instead, I'll have to render each day's table page, save it as HTML to a file and then go through those files to get the data. It's a lot of right-click-save-as drudgery. The mods to my code to scrape the data once it's saved as individual files are minimal, but I don't have the time to grind through two months of web pages right now. Tomorrow morning, for sure. In the meantime, here are the stars of the show, shot on location recently and then the dreaded table of data. Enjoy.

Tobacco plants grow to 4-6 feet tall, so while they may seem crowded by the neighboring flowers, that shouldn't last long unless their growth is stunted by San Diego's severe cold weather.


The data table. So close and yet so far away!

3 comments:

Tom said...

There must be a data source out there that’s queriable without web Scraping

K T Cat said...

I'm sure there is, but it would take effort to find it and with this, I can put on headphones and do a mindless 10 minutes of right-click-save-as. :-)

tim eisele said...

Yeah, I think a big part of being trained as a meteorologist (or being trained in almost any technical field, for that matter), is learning where the good data is squirreled away, and how to get at it.