Publications by Steven Mosher
A question from the R list
I am currently working on rectifying the GHCN station list to improve the location information. Its the kind of database work that is mind numbingly tedious and a PITA in R. not because R lacks capabilities, its just tough and not very sexy to matching and fuzzy matching and greping and blah blah blah. Instead, I’ll try to work a problem that w...
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Errors in Ghcn Inventories
In the debate over the accuracy of the global temperature nothing is more evident than errors in the location data for stations in the GHCN inventory. That inventory is the primary source for all the temperature series. One question is “do these mistakes make a difference?” If one believes as I do that the record is largely correct, then it�...
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Wetbulb Temperature
This google map display is just one of 230 GHCN stations that is located in the water. After finding instances of this phenomena over and over, it seemed an easy thing to find and analyze all such cases in GHCN. The issue matters for a two reasons: In my temperature analysis program I use a land/water mask to isolate land temperatures from sea...
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Ghcn V3 Metadata improvements
The Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) is in it’s beta stage. On of the stated goals of the project is to improve the metadata that is provided for the station data. Over the past few months several independent volunteers have been focusing on the issue of station metadata, each with their own focus. Ron Broberg deserves credit for ta...
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Making Simple Packages in R on Windows
There are any number of short tutorials on making add on R packages on your Windows machine. This is yet another version of that process. I’ve explained what I did in 10 easy steps on the pages, but I’ll give a brief overview here. In the first step I spent some time updating my R environment. For me that means getting the latest copy of R ...
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RGhcnV3 A new package
It’s been a long journey and there are some people to thank for helping me along the way. Steve McIntyre, Ron Broberg, Jeff Id, Ryan ODonnell, RomanM, Nick Stokes, Robert Hijmans, Gabor Grothendieck, Hadley Wickham, David Winsemius, and countless others on the R Help list. The Package is done. Package: RghcnV3 Type: Package Title: Global Hist...
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Package RghcnV3
I am down to the last strokes of creating a package for downloading, importing and analyzing GHCN (Global Historical Climate Network0 Version 3. There were a few things holding me up, but I’ve manged to handle all of them except the last one. Let’s spend a little time looking at the package process so you can get an idea of everything...
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RghcnV3 version 1.1
I’ve just uploaded version 1.1 of the package RghcnV3 to Cran. I’ve made a few changes that should make it easier for some folks to use. First I removed the requirement for rgdal. At the present time “rgdal” is not required. On the MAC installing it can be a little trouble, but if you RTFM you can get it done. I’ll look for ways to pr...
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Tamino’s Method: Regional Temperatures
Tamino over at Open Mind has a new post detailing his approach for calculating temperature averages. See his post here. His method is based on the Berkeley method as he notes and he uses it primarily for calculating regional or local temperature averages. Read his post for the math details behind the approach. I got my hands on the code last ni...
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Version 1.3 Verified
Whew, For a few hours last night I struggled with a bug, err several bugs. In the end some of the bugs were mine, some of them were “upstream” and some of them were far “upstream”. Image bugs in R 2.13.1. But the math bugs ( or flat out errors on my part) have all been fixed. And the verification of the results is done. version 1....
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