Directions for US station data plotting and analysis web pages
Philosophy: These pages are designed for users to be able to quickly plot and analyze US station data. Options are supplied so that plots from different cities and regions can be compared. Analysis tools make it possible to examine climatological distributions and annual means and compare them with those created using a user defined set of years. Results are meant to be illustrative and will not necessarily be the same as those done using a more rigorous analysis that may take into account data errors and estimations, different definitions of atmospheric processes (e.g. PNA) and the like. Users should download the dataset themselves for further research.
General Instructions
From the main web page, the user can select one of the 48 continental US states. Then from the next web page, the user can choose the type of output (time series, climatology or distribution). The next page displayed shows all the stations available for that state plus the climate divisions for each state. You choose a station, a variable and the appropriate options and you get a plot. You can change to a different state or type of plot from each of the three plotting pages w/o going back to the main page.The web page uses data from the DOE dataset. In addition, daily climate divisions values are calculated by averaging all the stations available in a division. The data set is stored in netCDF. A Perl script reads in the options, obtains and processes the data. It is then plotted using gnuplot which is simple but very quick plotting program.