Wednesday, October 02, 2019

The Temperature Data Is Inaccurate

Project Description: I'm growing tobacco very late in the season. I'm concerned that it will be too cold for the plants to properly develop. I'm going to chart daily temperatures and see what happens with them.

Today's Update: I managed to fight through a couple of technical problems with my tobacco temperature project and collected Weather Underground temperature data from their nearest station for August and September. The station is less than a mile away, so the temperature readings there should be plenty accurate for me.

They aren't.

This has been a very mild summer*. We haven't broken 100 yet, which, for us, is highly unusual. Our first summer in this house, 10 years ago, had about 3 weeks of 100+ days. Still, we've had plenty of days in the 90s. The hourly temperature data from WU for the 61 days of August and September shows nothing out of the 80s.

Click on it for a better view. The guidelines in the first half show the optimal temperature range for tobacco. They stop halfway through because of an error in my code. I don't have the time to correct it this morning, so we'll just let it go.
For conservative conspiracy theorists, this is going in the wrong direction. We'd expect them to be cheating on the high side, not the low side. This tells me their data collection system is all horked up.

In any case, the dataset is unusable. I checked the live readings from the station yesterday and they were accurate. Somewhere in the process of saving the data, it looks like they're inserting data from a different station. Maybe one in Alberta or something.

Oh well. Back to the drawing board.

Completely Off Topic: My current audio book is a collection of speeches by MLK. I would argue that if you consume a large amount of someone's writing or speeches, you can pick out 3-4 major themes that define their worldview. I've only listened to two of his speeches so far, but I think I'm getting a sense of how he thought. More on that in later blog posts.

* - Lower temperatures mean that we are suffering from Climate Change and not Global Warming. Next year, if we get back to the 3-digit days, we'll know that Global Warming has resumed.

4 comments:

tim eisele said...

Well, obviously, now you need to install your *own* weather station!

Ohioan@Heart said...

Did you look at the National Weather Service?

This link is for San Diego Montgomery Field: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lon=-117.13856460141875&lat=32.81621688476466#.XZTLISVlDYU

Scroll down near the bottom to the map and then move/zoom the map until you can click on your house location. From that page you can click on the 3-Day History link (at the bottom of the current conditions). That page has (usually) hourly temperatures, humidity, etc. I find that for my house it is usually close, but typically a degree or two low during midday.

Enjoy.

K T Cat said...

Tim, I thought of that briefly and might do it another time. I like the idea, but I'm not sure I want to invest the time and money.

Ohioan - BINGO! Dig this: https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/timeseries.php?sid=KMYF&num=1680&wfo=sgx

num is the number of samples you want. As long as it's a multiple of 24, it works. I can make it go back as far as I want and it means I only need to save one file. Thanks!

Foxfier said...

For conservative conspiracy theorists, this is going in the wrong direction. We'd expect them to be cheating on the high side, not the low side

That's actually how the fraud was found.

Urban heat island is a known thing--- shocker, lots of blacktop means lots of heat.

but that randomly didn't show up was stuff where it SHOULD have.

Then Mr. Watt's up had his hid go do first person research.

...

It didn't match theory.