Staten Island Chuck's Report Card
It is now officially spring and I thought I would review the temperature record over the past 47 says since Groundhog Day to see how Staten Island Chuck's prediction panned out.If Chuck hadn't come tumbling out of his house onto a stage lit for TV cameras which cast a shadow, and if he hadn't been in an area surrounded by buildings and trees where there was no hope that the Sun, only at altitude 3.6°, would have had any chance of reaching him to cast a shadow, it is unlikely that he would have seen his shadow due to it being overcast at that time. That would mean, according to weather lore, which has no basis in science or fact,
If on February 2 (Groundhog Day in the United States and Canada) the groundhog sees its shadow, thirty days of winter remain. If not, spring will follow immediately.that we should have had an early spring. We were told that an "early spring" was when the temperatures are "abnormally high" between Groundhog Day, on 2Feb2012, and the March Equinox, on 20Mar2012. "Abnormally high" temperatures were defined as days when the high temperature is above 40° F. By that measure we have had an early spring with the high temperature being above 40° on 94% of those days.
But I want to know where the magic number of 40° F came from and that was never explained. Looking in the historical weather data I tried to deduce it. The Weather Service reports the high, low and mean temperatures for each 24 hour period. They also provide the average of those same parameters for all records in the data history. Lastly they provide the recorded temperature extremes for the date. So I collected data for each day and made some calculations. It would seem that if a high of over 40° F is the standard then that should be the average of the average high temperature for all days within the date range. It isn't. The average of the averages is 44° F (Central Park) or 45° F (Newark Airport, the location Weather Underground uses when you ask for data for the zoo's ZIP Cide). So the rodent is given a statistical head start before he even wakes up to make his prediction.
Basing this assessment on the high temperature doesn't seem like a good way to go since it ignores any really low temperature days or cold snaps that might occur. So I thought comparing the mean temperature to the average mean temperature for the date would be a better way to go. By that measure the daily mean was higher than the average daily mean 87% of the time. But does just being warmer than the average mean temperature make the day abnormally warm. I think not. To be abnormally warm I would think the temperature would have to exceed the average mean by x%. But I don't know what value to adding to x.
I also compared the high temperature for each date to the average high temperature for that date and found that it was only higher 75% of the time.
So any way I have been able to figure to figure it, the rodent was right . . . If he did indeed predict anything.
| Central Park | Newark Airport | |
|---|---|---|
| High Temp >=40° F | 96.6% | 93.9% |
| High Temp <=32°: F | 2.1% | 0.0% |
| Low Temp <=32& deg; F | 29.8% | 36.2% |
| Mean Temp >=40° F | 57.4% | 53.2% |
| High Temp >= Avg High | 74.5% | 76.6% |
| Mean Temp >= Avg Mean | 87.2% | 93.6% |
Druid For A Day
I went up to the McGraw-Hill building today to watch the Sun alignment with the Sun Triangle.it looked like it was going to be a sparse crowd. There were only two office workers and me at 1245 EDT. Then at 1255 a group of 9 office workers arrived. It seems that they were there for the event at noon but it didn't happen so they went back to work. When they got there someone realized that it was because they hadn't reset their sundials to EDT so they came back at the appropriate time.
The Sun was playing hide and seek behind the clouds and at the time of the alignment it happened to have been hiding. It came out at 1301:15 and you could see from the shadow that the alignment was already over. But then at around 1305 it looked like there was minimal shadow again.
 | |
|---|---|
| Date | 19 March 2012 |
| Time | 2045 EDT |
| Location | NW corner of 4 Ave @ Bay Ridge Ave, Brooklyn, NY 40.63479338374345°N 73.02361030366768°W |
| Location Comments | |
| Constellation | Leo |
| NELM | Mag. 0 |
| Cloud Cover | Observed: 100% Reported: >50% |
| Sky Comments | When I went into my meeting at 1900 the sky was perfectly clear and I left at 2030 expecting to see Venus and Jupiter and Mars and then Saturn when I arrived home only to find that it was now overcast and I couldn't find anything at all. |
