25 The cold rain
In this project, you will use weather data to explore a question of your choice. Here is an example question that you may certainly use:
What is the relationship between temperature and precipitation?
You could start this by creating a claim. Where I live, a good first claim might be:
It’s colder when it rains.
25.1 Weather data
You can get weather data from the NOAA plugin. Go to the Plugins menu, then Getting Data, then NOAA Weather. Figure out how to get data, get some, and start exploring. It is colder when it rains? Is there some other obvious, simple claim you can address?
25.2 Example start
For me, I got one year of data from San Francisco airport. I made a new attribute called anyPrecip (calculating!) with this formula:1
precip > 0 ? "wet" : "dry"
and plotted that against the high temperature:
And as you can see, it is colder when it rains.
Are we done? Of course not. It’s too simplistic. See if you can figure out why.
25.3 Your task
You will get different data, of course, and analyze it, assessing your own claim or answering your own question. Then, did deeper, of course. Add nuance. Be a devil’s advocate.
25.3.1 Alternative data
You could get data from somewhere else, of course. Here is another source with cities in other countries.
Notice the cool syntax with the trinary
?-and-:operator; it’s an alternative toIF().↩︎