Directions on US station data plotting and analysis Pages

Plots of Distributions

This page will plot the climatology of US stations and US climate divisions.

Variables

Maximum temperature, minimum temperature and (liquid) precipitation. Also available are the record maximum value and minimum values for each variable for each day of the year. The climatologies are based on 1950-1999 unless ,you enter a different range of years. Leap days (Feb 29th) are ignored everywhere! Weekly values are calculated from 7 day averages starting Jan 1 -Dec 29 or 30th. I may change this definition at a latter date. Record values are derived from the time averaging selected. The record high maximum temperature on a particular day is the highest value for 1950-1999 (or the set of years you specify). The record high monthly value would be the highest monthly average and NOT the highest value during that month.

Stations available

Stations included in the list have a fairly complete time coverage from 1950-1999 and have both precipitation and temperature available. Climate Division values are calculated by averaging all the stations within a climate division. No attempt was made to area weight within a division. Latitude, longitude and elevation will available for each station from the data description web page.

Type of climatology

(N/A yet). Values are available for different time averages. Precipitation will be the total value for the time period. Record values will be averaged (the maximum value in the time period is NOT what is reported).

Time Range

This will set the x-range of the plot. Set the first day and the last day to be plotted.

Year Range

The climatology is calculated using all the years from 1950 to 1999 are used unless values are entered here. Your years should be 1950 to 1999 with the first year being less than the 2nd. Standard deviations are not valid if a one year range is entered.

Y range

The code will automatically select a y range. Changing it depending on the results may make it easier to see some bins. You can also compare different cities or seasons more easily.

Smoother

The data will be smoothed with a running mean smoother. It is centered if you enter an odd number of days for the smoothing.Data is smoothed over Dec 31. Note that the data is smoothed after computing values for the averaging period specified. So weekly plots are NOT averages of daily smoothed data.

Sample Plot