OpenTemp.org

This page will evolve into a list of new features organized by release version and date. For now, it is just a place to store ideas for the program:

• Settings file
  • YAML for easy processing and human-readability
  • Replaces command-line switches
  • References additional files (for station lists, regions of interest, etc)
  • Rough format
    • Group
      • Name
      • Description
      • Folder
      • Defaults (default settings for all analyses)
        • Name
        • Description
        • Folder (sub-folder below group folder)
        • Method (temperature or trend)
        • Stations
          • File
          • Radius (averaging stations to get grid-points)
          • Select
          • Random NN (select NN random stations from the list)
          • Repeat MM (repeat MM times)

      • Dates (global dates for analysis)
        • Start
        • End 
      • Grid

      • File (or description of how to create the grid)

      • Radius (interpolating between grid-points)
      • Data File
        • File type
        • File name
        • File filters (for USHCN)

    • Output
      • File prefix
      • Details of what should be output (see below)
  • Analysis
    • (overrides from Defaults section above)

Station Lists

• Comments should be supported
• Add start and finish dates for each station series (optional)
• Add accuracy errors (standard deviation for normal distribution)
• Add bias errors (parameters for bias error distribution; exponential? poisson?)
• Grouping should be supported
• Station meta-data should be supported (”name=value,name=value,…” after latitude and longitude)

Input

• Support for USHCNv1 data files (ending in 2000)
  • see ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/README.TXT 
  • hcn_mmts_min_data.Z, hcn_mmts_max_data.Z, hcn_mmts_mean_data.Z
    (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/OtherIntermediates/)
• Support for USHCNv2 data files (when they are available)

Data

• Data flags
  • interpolated
  • estimated
  • number of missing days in month
  • time of observation flags
  • outlier flags

Temperature Analysis

• Analysis by sub-region and total region
• Analysis by groups of stations
• Random selection of stations
  • List defines all stations of interest
  • Parameter defines number of stations to randomly select
  • Parameter defines number of random repeats
• Investigate new methods of averaging across stations (the current method may give too much influence to clusters of stations in one area)
• Iterate for series-endpoint-bias (SEB)
• Time of Observation bias (”/tobs”)
• Options to exclude interpolated or estimated data
• Support for processing min, max, and mean in one run
  • write results of all three to a single output file
• Multiple analyses from one run
  • 1D results combined in a single file
  • 2D results written to separate files (with naming convention)

World Grid

• Additional regions
• Change from rectangles to geoids (what shape?)
• Data files that define regions as perimeters
• Analysis should be done for the whole globe
  • Results can be broken down by region in a post-processing step

Output

•  Output temperatures per grid cell (”/celltemp:1900+5y” or similar)
• Output images at selected years (”/cellmap:1900+5y” or similar)
• Write all data directly to Excel spreadsheet with multiple workbooks (”/xls”)
  • Requires 3rd-party library

Error Bars

• Quantify error bars in station monthly averages
• Quantify error bars in cell temps
  • Dependent on influence of adjacent cells
  • May be more feasible to quantify errors in cell temp trends

End-User

• ClickOnce installation
• GUI for selecting options and stations
• GUI for viewing station data
  • Google Earth to station location
  • Raw and shifted temperature history (series-endpoint-bias)
• GUI for viewing results
  • Charts
  • Maps