As in the previous post about recent plummeting global temperatures, I want to look at the statistics of the drop, and determine its significance. The sort of questions of interest are, how improbable is a fall in temperatures of that magnitude of a 12 month period? After all, it is irresponsible to report alarming results without demonstrating the statistical significance. Unfortunately it is a common practice, for example, see record high temperatures from NASA. The statistical setup for answering Read more [...] 10 com

As reported by Anthony Watts at his blog post at Watt's Up With That, global surface temperatures plummeted in the month of January. All four major sources of temperature anomoly data reported sharp drops, averaging -0.6405C. It is also reported that the large contribution to this value is from Northern Hemisphere land temperatures showing a huge drop of 2.4C from last January. Here is the monthly global surface temperature anomaly data from the UK Hadley Climate Research Unit illustrating the Read more [...] 12 com

While looking at a roadside cutting in order to evaluate options for treating it for erosion, I thought it would be interesting to gather the data and develop a 3D model in R. The process can be confusing the first time, as the data need to be massaged to meet the requirements of the interpolative algorithm that converts scattered heights to a regular grid, which can then be visualized. Below is the process I used, and it was relatively quick. Step 1. First I walked a transect every 25m along Read more [...] none