Lesson 4: Analyzing one station’s data

Estimated time to complete: 30-90 minutes
In this exercise, you will complete the code and comments for the script process_adelaide.m (which is found in your MATLAB Drive). When completed, this script will load data for the climate station Adelaide Airport, and carry out the same analysis as you completed in a spreadsheet for the first part of your Climate Data Assignment. You will also load data for the climate station Detroit Metro Ap (Detroit Metro Airport) and create a scatterplot of annual temperature anomalies between the two sites. This should give you a good understanding of the power of scripted approaches, and you’ll build on this script to create a final deliverable that can complete analysis for all sites at once.

By the end of this lesson, you will have created the following required deliverable:

• A script called process_adelaide.m, which completes analyses successfully and produces three figures named”:
  • Adelaide Airport_timeseries.png
  • Adelaide Airport_barcode.png
  • Adelaide_vs_Detroit.png

Video

Direct link to video.

1. Setup

1. Make sure your Working Directory is set to / > MATLAB Drive > iSci3A12-SciProgramming. This is where we will run our scripts and analyses.
2. In MATLAB, open the file process_adelaide.m. This script has been mostly completed for you. Your tasks are described below:

2. Your tasks

1. Execute the script line-by-line (hint: use the F9 key, read comments, and view the resulting variables to understand what each line of code is doing.
2. Look for comments that contain <**TO DO**> and instructions. Complete the code on these lines.
3. Ensure that the script runs without issues (i.e. by clicking the Run button) and produces three figures in the \Figs directory.
4. Add comments to the top comment section and on other lines where you’ve added code.

3. Hints

1. Already included in the function is some code that will remove -9999s from your data. If your timeseries graph shows a steep drop in values (e.g. equal to -9999), you’ve likely used the wrong variable to calculate anomalies.

4. Deliverables

• Ensure that all changes to your script process_adelaide are saved.
• NOTE that you are submitting the script and not the output (Jay is going to run the script on his computer to evaluate that it creates the proper outputs).

5. Head to the next exercise

Now that you’ve processed one site, the challenge is to generalize this code into a function that can analyze all sites in your data folder at once! Head to the final lesson. One more to go!

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