Aubrie Pace Intern Project

2007-12-22 19:49:59.000 – Aubrie Pace,  Summit Intern

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For my past few months on the summit, I have been working on an intern research project. I started with the idea of gathering statistics of weather data from the past 75 years. That quickly snowballed as I realized all of this weather data was located in written records on B16 weather forms. I had two options: go through with a calculator and get my numbers or try making a database. To my relief, I found out that The Observatory had made a database with the records. This would make my job much easier and I could quickly get the statistics. I wrote a timeline for my work and thought I would be done in three weeks. It is now five weeks since I have written that timeline and I have had many obstacles since then.

I first made a list of statistics I was asked to find and added some more of my own. Things I would be focusing on were wind speeds, temperatures, heating and cooling days, highest precipitation and highest snowfall along with many others. I also planned to focus on summaries for every day, month, year, and time period. Daily so that I could compare to the almanac, monthly to get a good outlook on every month to find averages, and yearly to get highest wind speeds, precipitation, or snowfall for that year. The time periods I decided to focus on as well started with the entire life of The Observatory and then was divided into the two buildings The Observatory has been housed in, the Stage Office and the current Sherman Adams Building. When I finally accessed the database that was already compiled, I found my ideas for what statistics to gather reached further than the entered information I had to use. I then started to make an excel sheet that I could use to enter data for the last 75 years. Making the database and entering in 1935 took me an entire week. Every week after that, as I attempted to enter new years into that database, I found that as the B16 format changed so must my database. After getting every B16 to fit accurately, I decided to make sure it was simple for data entry so the observers could start using it everyday to have an electronic backup. I finished that process the last week we were on the summit.

That brings me to this week; my last week on the summit. I sit here writing this comment with 2 full years entered into my database, most of December for this year added as well, and no final statistics. It is difficult for me to do so much work and not finish this project, but as I got further into my project I realized it was impossible for me to finish myself. However, when it is finished I have a feeling it will be very important to The Observatory. So I’m sorry that I’m not post my findings, but you will hopefully have them soon. For now I will work as hard as can until I leave the summit for the final time of my internship on Wednesday.

Aubrie Pace,  Summit Intern