[Babase] Rain units and other weather leftovers

Karl O. Pinc kop at meme.com
Fri Mar 27 00:19:24 EDT 2009


Tabby,

I've another data problem with the weather data.
The docs say that the RAINGAUGES.Rain column has
millimeters as the units.  The data you sent is
pretty clearly not in millimeters.  Is it inches
and should I convert to millimeters before trying
to upload?

For that matter it does not look like inches either.
There's a value of 84.0.  That's an awful lot
of rain.

Note that RAINGAUGES.Rain is (supposedly) an
integral number of millimeters, no decimal point allowed.
If we really need fractions of a millimeter then
the original measurement was probably in inches
and was converted.  In that case we could consider
doing for the rain units what was originally designed
for the temperature measurements, store the
value as read, have another column
for the units, and have a function/view that automatically
converts the units and makes them consistent.

I'll be sending you back a "final" version of the
data under separate cover.  The only difference
between that version an the last I sent is
that the new version has the weather station location
names converted to codes, and has the date and
time columns merged into a single column.

So, the columns are:

wrdaytime       estdaytime      wstation        wrperson        tempmin
tempmaxrain     wrnotes

The file (should be) suitable for upload into
the MIN_MAXS view.  So, this will be the format
that you use for data entry.  (Of course, you
can have the columns in any order you like.)
How does it look as a data entry format?

Finally, I assume that the dates are in European
format as always.  (Can't hurt to double check.)

If you felt like it you could read over all the
new documentation.  You might want to wait
if you think we're going to make changes.
The new/changed docs are:

The pocket reference
https://papio.biology.duke.edu/pocket_reference.pdf

Views
https://papio.biology.duke.edu/babase_system_html/ch02s06.html

Weather Data (the whole chapter)
https://papio.biology.duke.edu/babase_system_html/ch05.html

OBSERVERS
https://papio.biology.duke.edu/babase_system_html/ch06s19.html

MIN_MAXS
https://papio.biology.duke.edu/babase_system_html/ch07s24.html

MIN_MAXS_SORTED
https://papio.biology.duke.edu/babase_system_html/ch07s25.html

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein



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