A few suggestions to get you started

1. Check the trails box and click on the green circle before you press play.

2. Try plotting time on the x-axis, snow melt date on the y-axis. Set the color control to total annual snow fall and the size to same size. Do you see a relationship between snow melt date and total annual snowfall? How does the plot change if you click on the tab with the zig-zag line in the upper right hand corner? (This is a time series plot.)

3. Try plotting first sighting of glacier lilies (y-axis) against snow melt date (x-axis) and set the circle colors to total snowfall. How do these dates compare with total snow fall?

4. Play! Look for other patterns in the data.

(Note on the data visualizer: This type of graph, where values for two variables are plotted in cartesian coordinates, is called a scatter plot. Scatter plots don’t typically have lines connecting data points!)

 

Next step – Biology of Climate Change assignment.

 

Download billy barr’s Climate Data

For the first part of the phenology assignment, click here to view a spreadsheet containing the primary data set used in Inouye et al., 2000 and highlighted in the visualization tool above.

Additional data that you may choose to use in part three of the assignment: For all of billy barr’s daily weather observations from Sept. 1975 through July 2010, click on the link below. This file contains daily minimum and maximum temperature, new snow, melt water equivalent, total snow fall, snow pack, and rainfall. CAUTION: this is a very large (2.1 MB) Excel file with over 12000 rows of data and may take a while to download. RMBLWeatherData_2010.xls