Early-season ski from work

Yesterday a co-worker and I were talking about how we weren’t able to enjoy the new snow because the weather had turned cold as soon as the snow stopped falling. Along the way, she mentioned that it seemed to her that the really cold winter weather was coming later and later each year. She mentioned years past when it was bitter cold by Halloween.

The first question to ask before trying to determine if there has been a change in the date of the first cold snap is what qualifies as “cold.” My officemate said that she and her friends had a contest to guess the first date when the temperature didn’t rise above -20°F. So I started there, looking for the month and day of the winter when the maximum daily temperature was below -20°F.

I’m using the GHCN-Daily dataset from NCDC, which includes daily minimum and maximum temperatures, along with other variables collected at each station in the database.

When I brought in the data for the Fairbanks Airport, which has data available from 1948 to the present, there was absolutely no relationship between the first -20°F or colder daily maximum and year.

However, when I changed the definition of “cold” to the first date when the daily minimum temperature is below -40, I got a weak (but not statistically significant) positive trend between date and year.

The SQL query looks like this:

SELECT year, water_year, water_doy, mmdd, temp
FROM (
    SELECT year, water_year, water_doy, mmdd, temp,
        row_number() OVER (PARTITION BY water_year ORDER BY water_doy) AS rank
    FROM (
        SELECT extract(year from dte) AS year,
            extract(year from dte + interval '92 days') AS water_year,
            extract(doy from dte + interval '92 days') AS water_doy,
            to_char(dte, 'mm-dd') AS mmdd,
            sum(CASE WHEN variable = 'TMIN'
                     THEN raw_value * raw_multiplier
                     ELSE NULL END
               ) AS temp
        FROM ghcnd_obs
            INNER JOIN ghcnd_variables USING(variable)
        WHERE station_id = 'USW00026411'
        GROUP BY extract(year from dte),
            extract(year from dte + interval '92 days'),
            extract(doy from dte + interval '92 days'),
            to_char(dte, 'mm-dd')
        ORDER BY water_year, water_doy
    ) AS foo
    WHERE temp < -40 AND temp > -80
) AS bar
WHERE rank = 1
ORDER BY water_year;

I used “water year” instead of the actual year because the winter is split between two years. The water year starts on October 1st (we’re in the 2013 water year right now, for example), which converts a split winter (winter of 2012/2013) into a single year (2013, in this case). To get the water year, you add 92 days (the sum of the days in October, November and December) to the date and use that as the year.

Here’s what it looks like (click on the image to view a PDF version):

The dots are the observed date of first -40° daily minimum temperature for each water year, and the blue line shows a linear regression model fitted to the data (with 95% confidence intervals in grey). Despite the scatter, you can see a slightly positive slope, which would indicate that colder temperatures in Fairbanks are coming later now, than they were in the past.

As mentioned, however, our eyes often deceive us, so we need to look at the regression model to see if the visible relationship is significant. Here’s the R lm results:

Call:
lm(formula = water_doy ~ water_year, data = first_cold)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max
-45.264 -15.147  -1.409  13.387  70.282

Coefficients:
             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -365.3713   330.4598  -1.106    0.274
water_year     0.2270     0.1669   1.360    0.180

Residual standard error: 23.7 on 54 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.0331,     Adjusted R-squared: 0.01519
F-statistic: 1.848 on 1 and 54 DF,  p-value: 0.1796

The first thing to check in the model summary is the p-value for the entire model on the last line of the results. It’s only 0.1796, which means that there’s an 18% chance of getting these results simply by chance. Typically, we’d like this to be below 5% before we’d consider the model to be valid.

You’ll also notice that the coefficient of the independent variable (water_year) is positive (0.2270), which means the model predicts that the earliest cold snap is 0.2 days later every year, but that this value is not significantly different from zero (a p-value of 0.180).

Still, this seems like a relationship worth watching and investigating further. It might be interesting to look at other definitions of “cold,” such as requiring three (or more) consecutive days of -40° temperatures before including that period as the earliest cold snap. I have a sense that this might reduce the year to year variation in the date seen with the definition used here.

Stairs in sunlight

We got another couple inches of snow last night, and while we don't yet have enough for me to ski to work, it certainly looks like winter. Winter in Fairbanks may be cold (OK, very cold), but it's also very sunny and because the angle of the sun is so low, the light is orange and gorgeous.

Nika

Squirrel on the water tank

Dolphins in HD

Yesterday I saw that CBS was going to show the Dolphins this morning. Ho hum, another almost unwatchable low-definition sporting event on our local CBS network. But it’s the Dolphins, so I watched anyway. When the picture started to flicker at 7-2, I switched to the other location for CBS, 13-1, and like magic, it was in High Definition! I don’t know if this is just for live sporting events (like the NBC affiliate in Fairbanks), but it sure looks great.

Even stranger, the Dolphins are currently beating the Giants 14–3. If they’re not careful, they might win a game this season!

The photo above was taken just before the intersection of Sheep Creek / Goldstream Roads and Murphy Dome Road, less than half a mile from where I work, and about four miles from our house as the crow flies. I’ve spent the last three hours backing up data, and getting our servers ready for possible evacuation. We’re both downwind (currently) and downhill from the fire, but it’s dangerously dry in Fairbanks right now, and if the wind shifts, we find ourselves evacuating our offices.

More as it happens…