Innovative Climate ProductsHeat Index, Holiday, and Recreation Climatologies

Ashley Frazier, Corey Davis, John McGuire, Mark Brooks, and Ryan Boyles

Virginia and Carolinas Climate ConferenceOctober 20, 2009

Wilmington, NC

Motivation

• Heat Index Climatology– Request from NWS to look at frequency of high

heat index by location

• Holiday Climatology– Request from media for climatology for holidays

that don’t fall on same date each year

• Recreation Climatology– Corey’s dad wants to know where to fish

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Heat Index Climatology

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Heat Index Climatology

• Only stations with long-term hourly data are included

• The earliest start year possible is 1972- Discrepancy among many of these long-

term stations from the late 1960s through the early 1970s when observations were taken every 3 hours

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Heat Index Climatology

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Heat Index Climatology

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Heat Index Climatology

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30 seconds to generate this graph

Holiday Climatology

• Product provides temperature and precipitation averages, extremes for a specified holiday

• Use NWS long-term COOP data

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Holiday Climatology

New Year’s Day*Martin Luther King DayGroundhog DayValentine’s Day*President’s DaySt. Patrick’s Day*Easter*Memorial DayIndependence Day

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*Labor Day

*Columbus Day

Halloween

*Election Day

Veteran’s Day

*Thanksgiving

Christmas Eve

Christmas Day

New Year’s Eve

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Holiday Climatology

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Recreation Climatology

• Provides favorable climate conditions for outdoor activities in the Southeast

• Users can input their intended activity, location, and/or date range, or may search for any of these three criteria

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The recreation climatology main page, with a general search entered in the top panel.

Recreation Climatology

• Once the information has been selected and the user clicks “Submit”, a three-step process takes place:

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1. Data retrieval

2. Data rating

3. Data return

Recreation Climatology

• Developed hourly climatology for temperature, humidity, winds, precipitation, cloud cover

• User defines location – we select nearest station

• Favorable conditions are calculated based on thresholds

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• For each activity, the significance of each parameter is listed as a percentage

• Not all activities are sensitive to a given parameter

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Recreation Climatology• A favorability rating between 0 and 5 is assigned

to each retrieved weather parameter for each hour

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Recreation Climatology

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Recreation Climatology

• The formulas used in the schemes are not currently based on scientific or survey data, so ratings may be arbitrary

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Recreation Climatology

• Finally, the results are returned to the user depending on his or her search

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- General (user inputs Activity, Location, and Date Range)

- Activity (user inputs Location and Date Range)- Location (user inputs Activity and Date Range)- Date Range (user inputs Activity and location)

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Questions?

Heat Index Climatologyhttp://www.nc-climate.ncsu.edu/climate/heat_index_climatology.php

Holiday Climatologyhttp://www.nc-climate.ncsu.edu/holiday_climatology.php

Recreation Climatology- Not yet operational; still work to be done to optimize queries

for quick data retrieval and display

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