[Babase] Rain units and other weather leftovers

kfenn kfenn at princeton.edu
Fri Mar 27 15:26:50 EDT 2009


Karl ,
Please my replies below. 

Also, we found a few records in your daytime.txt file where the date 
disappeared as part of programming functions (i've got the date in my 
excel sheet).  This seems to occur when we have no min max temp readings 
but there is a precip reading.  See 5/11/88 and 7/4/89 for example.

Tabby

Karl O. Pinc wrote:
> 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.
>
Jeanne looked at some of the high precip measures from the file you sent 
and they were consistent with the hard data so it doesn't appear that 
there are any corrections to make.  Yes, they are supposed to be in 
millimeters.
The value of 84 was after 12 days of missed readings (3/1/89).  It's not 
noted in the comments, but I'm sure there are a lot of days like that.  
If an observer didn't write it into the comments, well it wouldn't have 
been entered as a comment.  The span tables are supposed to address 
that, right?

> 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 see what you are saying.  I looked up one decimal values (21.84 on 
23/2/77)  The values were recorded in inches on our hard copies.  Jeanne 
should say how she wants to deal with the decimal resulting from these 
conversions.
>
>
> 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?
>
I think we need to have you do programmer magic to slam the date and 
time together during the upload.  I didn't see an easy way to do this in 
excel and my experience is that excel can be quirky with date  
manipulations (switching from english to america); I would feel safer if 
you programmed it.
> Finally, I assume that the dates are in European
> format as always.  (Can't hurt to double check.)
>
Yes, until I run a bad function in excel (see previous comment).

-- 
Tabby Fenn
Research Assistant

Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
401 Guyot Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ  08544

609 258-6898 (Ph)
609 258-2712 (Fx)



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