Record spring heat

Spring temperatures have been remarkably warm across most of the western USA – so much so, that it’s nearly impossible for these temperatures to occur without anthropogenic climate change. Many daily temperature records were set across CA and the entire Western USA.

Background

I recently received funding for a (very) small project to work on temperature statistics in complex terrain. Most of the project uses already existing data, but I wanted to take an opportunity to deploy some measurements of my own, partly as an excuse to get into the field. The sensors I made were fairly last-minute — in doing so, I found that there wasn’t really that much info about deploying these in real-world environments. It sounds easy, but I needed to make a low-cost tower that could withstand snow, wind, and extreme conditions for an entire season in the high mountains of the Colorado rockies. So here, I will outline what I did.

Evidence of global warming is everywhere.

I’m increasingly finding that scatterplots are not always the best data visualization tool, particularly when you’re dealing with datasets with lots of points. But I still see them published in papers all the time, even when they are not the appropriate choice (and I am probably guilty of this!).

Chat GPT-4 (https://chat.openai.com/) is taking off rapidly, and I’m admittedly a late-adopter. I recently used it for a quick project, and I can confidently say it drastically sped up my process.

This post shows a recipe for creating decent looking “hillshade” or “shaded relief” maps in python and matplotlib. I was inspired to do this after creating similar visualizations using the QGIS GUI. Using a GUI based program for making maps is, in my opinion, far superior to doing the same in python, since there are knobs and sliders for doing fine tuning of marker locations, colors, and the like. But sometimes you might want to display topography as part of another data visualization, in conjunction with other non-map data visuals. https://www.shadedrelief.com/ is a really cool website that shows off many examples of shaded relief maps.

The following link is for my 2021 AGU presentation. I describe a method to validate mountain precipitation estimates using streamflow, high resolution snow-lidar, simple hydrologic models, and bayesian inference https://youtu.be/Nune4HdeprI.

Use the ** operator in Python to clean up matplotlib plotting code

Emulating the Python unittesting module for non-unit test applications.