About the Challenge Expo

The Annual Data Challenge Expo is jointly sponsored by three American Statistical Association (ASA) Sections – Statistical Computing, Statistical Graphics, and Government Statistics.

Data

The atmos data set resides in the nasaweather package of the R programming language. It contains a collection of atmospheric variables measured between 1995 and 2000 on a grid of 576 coordinates in the western hemisphere. The data set comes from the ASA Data Expo.

  • temp - The mean monthly air temperature near the surface of the Earth (measured in degrees kelvin (K))
  • pressure - The mean monthly air pressure at the surface of the Earth (measured in millibars (mb))
  • ozone - The mean monthly abundance of atmospheric ozone (measured in Dobson units (DU)) \[celsius = kelvin – 273.15\] \[ fahrenheit = celsius \times \frac{9}{5} + 32 \]

Preparing the Data

library(nasaweather)
library(tidyverse)
means <- atmos %>%
  filter(year == year) %>%
  group_by(long, lat) %>%
  summarize(temp = mean(temp, na.rm = TRUE),
            pressure = mean(pressure, na.rm = TRUE),
            ozone = mean(ozone, na.rm = TRUE),
            cloudlow = mean(cloudlow, na.rm = TRUE),
            cloudmid = mean(cloudmid, na.rm = TRUE),
            cloudhigh = mean(cloudhigh, na.rm = TRUE)) %>%
  ungroup()

Ozone and temperature

Is the relationship between ozone and temperature useful for understanding fluctuations in ozone? A scatterplot of the variables shows a strong, but unusual relationship.

Conclusions

We suggest that ozone is highly correlated with temperature, but that a different relationship exists for each geographic region.