Weather Data

Big Data is about more than just massive data sets. We help our customers recognize which subsets of large volumes of information are of importance to them. Here we identified the two most important variables for our customer, temperature and cloud cover, and reduce many gigabytes of information down to a few hundred megabytes.

The condensed data set allows for rapid search, retrieval, and analysis. Here we show the history of air temperature measurements at Dulles Airport outside of Washington, DC. The record contains observations made every hour from 1973 through the end of 2014. These observations can then be averaged into daily, monthly, and annual averages. We use a moving average to record the average value in each previous period. The longest average period we use is 11 years. This is the approximate length of the solar cycle (the pattern of magnetic activity in our sun including sun spots).