sat, 05-nov-2011, 15:28
Stairs in sunlight

Stairs in sunlight

We got another couple inches of snow last night, and while we don't yet have enough for me to ski to work, it certainly looks like winter. Winter in Fairbanks may be cold (OK, very cold), but it's also very sunny and because the angle of the sun is so low, the light is orange and gorgeous.

Nika

Nika


Squirrel on the water tank

Squirrel on the water tank

tags: Fairbanks  winter  sun 
sun, 16-oct-2011, 09:41
The deck, 2011-10-15

The deck, 2011-10-15

It's been forever since I've made a blog post, mostly because I've spent the last three months building a new deck on our house. We had a deck on the south and east sides of the house, but after building the arctic entryway last summer, the part of the deck on the east side had to be removed. For this project, I added a new deck in front of the arctic entryway that connects to the part of the old deck that's on the south side of the house, and replaced all of the old deck boards on that section of the deck. This was a lot of work. I don't have the exact number but I've driven more than 2,500 screws in the last three months, and removed at least a third of that many pulling up the old decking.

I finished the stairs and stair railings on the entry section of the deck yesterday just in time; this morning we had a quarter of an inch of snow on the ground.

The top photo shows what the deck looked like yesterday, the bottom photo shows what it looked like this morning.

I bought one new tool for this project, a Ridgid cordless drill. This was because the deck screws from the old part of the deck were Phillips head and I knew I wanted to use square drive screws for the new sections. I figured I would use my corded drill to drive the new screws, and the cordless drill to remove the old ones. It turned out that the old screws were both Phillips and square drive so I only needed one drill. I used the cordless. It was fantastic. One big improvement over the corded drill, that I didn't realize is that it has a much higher RPM, which means it's much faster to drive (or remove) screws. Add to that the lighter weight and that I didn't have to drag a cord around and it's now one of my favorite tools. The only thing that managed to bog it down was drilling half-inch holes through wet pressure-treated 4x4s.

The deck, 2011-10-16

The deck, 2011-10-16

tags: construction  deck  house  snow  winter  summer 
tue, 01-mar-2011, 18:47

Sunset, Miller Hill

Sunset, Miller Hill

People always ask if we’re the coldest spot in town. I can’t really answer that, but I can find out if we’re the coldest reporting weather station in the region.

Once again, we’ll use PostgreSQL window functions to investigate. The following query finds the station in zone 222 (the National Weather Service region that includes Fairbanks) reporting the coldest temperature every hour during the winter, counts up all the stations that “won,” and then ranks them. The outermost query gets the total number of hourly winners and uses this to calculate the percentage of hours that each station was the coldest reporting station.

Check it out:

SELECT station, count,
    round(count / sum(count) OVER (
        ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING
    ) * 100, 1) AS percent
FROM (
    SELECT station, count(*) AS count
    FROM (
        SELECT station, dt_local, temp_f,
            rank() OVER (
                PARTITION BY dt_local ORDER BY temp_f
            )
        FROM (
            SELECT location || ' (' || station_id || ')' AS station,
                date_trunc('HOUR', dt_local) AS dt_local, temp_f
            FROM observations
                INNER JOIN stations USING (station_id)
            WHERE zone_id = 222
                AND dt_local between '2010-10-01' and '2011-03-31'
        ) AS foo
    ) AS bar WHERE bar.rank = 1 GROUP BY station ORDER BY count desc
) AS foobar;

And the results:

                station                 | count | percent
----------------------------------------+-------+---------
 Goldstream Creek (DW1454)              |  2156 |    51.0
 Chena Hot Springs (CNRA2)              |   484 |    11.5
 Eielson Air Force Base (PAEI)          |   463 |    11.0
 Parks Highway, MP 325.4 (NHPA2)        |   282 |     6.7
 Small Arms Range (SRGA2)               |   173 |     4.1
 Ballaine Road (AS115)                  |   153 |     3.6
 Fairbanks Airport (PAFA)               |   125 |     3.0
 Fort Wainwright (PAFB)                 |   107 |     2.5
 Ester Dome (FBSA2)                     |   103 |     2.4
 Eagle Ridge Road (C6333)               |    81 |     1.9
 Keystone Ridge (C5281)                 |    33 |     0.8
 Skyflight Ave (D6992)                  |    21 |     0.5
 14 Mile Chena Hot Springs Road (AP823) |    21 |     0.5
 College Observatory (FAOA2)            |    11 |     0.3
 Geophysical Institute (CRC)            |    10 |     0.2
 DGGS College Road (C6400)              |     1 |     0.0

Answer: Yep. We’re the coldest.

Update: Thinking about this a little bit more, the above analysis is biased against stations that don't report every hour. Another way to look at this is to calculate the hourly average temperature, subtract this from the data for each station during that hour, and then average those results for the whole winter. The query is made more complex because several stations report temperatures more than once an hour. If we simply averaged all these observations together with the stations that only reported once, these stations would bias the resulting hourly average. So we average each station's hourly data, then use that to calculate the zone average for the hour. Here's the query, and the results:

SELECT station, 
    round(avg(diff), 1) AS avg_diff 
FROM (
    SELECT station,
        dt_local, 
        temp_f - avg(temp_f) 
            OVER (
                PARTITION BY dt_local 
                ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING
            ) AS diff 
    FROM (
        SELECT location || ' (' || station_id || ')' AS station, 
            date_trunc('HOUR', dt_local) AS dt_local, 
            avg(temp_f) AS temp_f 
        FROM observations 
            INNER JOIN stations USING (station_id) 
        WHERE zone_id = 222 AND 
            dt_local between '2010-10-01' and '2011-03-31' 
        GROUP BY station, date_trunc('HOUR', dt_local)
    ) AS foo
) AS bar 
GROUP BY station 
ORDER BY avg_diff;
                station                 | avg_diff
----------------------------------------+----------
 Goldstream Creek (DW1454)              |     -6.8
 Eielson Air Force Base (PAEI)          |     -3.8
 Fort Wainwright (PAFB)                 |     -3.1
 Fairbanks Airport (PAFA)               |     -2.9
 Small Arms Range (SRGA2)               |     -2.8
 Chena Hot Springs (CNRA2)              |     -2.3
 DGGS College Road (C6400)              |     -0.7
 Ballaine Road (AS115)                  |     -0.6
 College Observatory (FAOA2)            |      1.0
 North Bias Drive (RSQA2)               |      1.3
 14 Mile Chena Hot Springs Road (AP823) |      3.1
 Skyflight Ave (D6992)                  |      3.3
 Geophysical Institute (CRC)            |      3.5
 Eagle Ridge Road (C6333)               |      3.8
 Parks Highway, MP 325.4 (NHPA2)        |      4.5
 Keystone Ridge (C5281)                 |      5.1
 Ester Dome (FBSA2)                     |      5.1
 Birch Hill Recreation Area (BHS)       |      6.8
fri, 08-oct-2010, 10:03

Back cabin

Back cabin

I’ve read predictions that this winter will be a strong La Niña period, which means that the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean temperature will be colder than normal. The National Weather Service has a lot of information on how this might affect the lower 48 states, but the only thing I’ve heard about how this might affect Fairbanks is that we can expect colder than normal temperatures. The last few years we’ve had below normal snowfall, and I was curious to find out whether La Niña might increase our chances of a normal or above-normal snow year.

Historical data for the ocean temperature anomaly are available from the Climate Prediction Center. That page has a table of “Oceanic Niño Index” (ONI) for 1950 to 2010 organized in three-month averages. El Niño periods (warmer ocean temperatures) correspond to a positive ONI, and La Niña periods are negative. I’ve got historical temperature, precipitation, and snow data for the Fairbanks International Airport over the same period from the “Surface Data, Daily” or SOD database that the National Climate Data Center maintains.

First, I downloaded the ONI index data, and wrote a short Python script that pulls apart the HTML table and dumps it into a SQLite3 database table as:

sqlite> CREATE TABLE nino_index (year integer, month integer, value real);

Next, I aggregated the Fairbanks daily data into the same (year, month) format and stuck the result into the SQLite3 database so I could join the two data sets together. Here’s the SOD query to extract and aggregate the data:

pgsql> SELECT extract(year from obs_dte) AS year, extract(month from obs_dte) AS month,
            avg(t_min) AS t_min, avg(t_max) AS t_max, avg((t_min + t_max) / 2.0) AS t_avg,
            avg(precip) AS precip, avg(snow) AS snow
       FROM sod_obs
       WHERE sod_id=’502968-26411’ AND obs_dte >= ’1950-01-01’
       GROUP BY year, month
       ORDER BY year, month;

Now we fire up R and see what we can find out. Here are the statements used to aggregate October through March data into a “winter year” and load it into an R data frame:

R> library(RSQLite)
R> drv = dbDriver("SQLite")
R> con <- dbConnect(drv, dbname = "nino_nina.sqlite3")
R> result <- dbGetQuery(con,
        "SELECT CASE WHEN n.month IN (1, 2, 3) THEN n.year - 1 ELSE n.year END AS winter_year,
                avg(n.value) AS nino_index, avg(w.t_min) AS t_min, avg(w.t_max) AS t_max, avg(w.t_avg) AS t_avg,
                avg(w.precip) AS precip, avg(w.snow) AS snow
         FROM nino_index AS n
            INNER JOIN noaa_fairbanks AS w ON n.year = w.year AND n.month = w.month
         WHERE n.month IN (10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3)
         GROUP BY CASE WHEN n.month IN (1, 2, 3) THEN n.year - 1 ELSE n.year END
         ORDER BY n.year;"
   )

What I’m interested in finding out is how much of the variation in winter snowfall can be explained by the variation in Oceanic Niño Index (nino_index in the data frame). Since it seems as though there has been a general trend of decreasing snow over the years, I include winter year in the analysis:

R> model <- lm(snow ~ winter_year + nino_index, data = result)
R> summary(model)

Call:
lm(formula = snow ~ winter_year, data = result)

Residuals:
      Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max
-0.240438 -0.105927 -0.007713  0.052905  0.473223

Coefficients:
              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept)  2.1000444  2.0863641   1.007    0.318
winter_year -0.0008952  0.0010542  -0.849    0.399

Residual standard error: 0.145 on 59 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.01208,    Adjusted R-squared: -0.004669
F-statistic: 0.7211 on 1 and 59 DF,  p-value: 0.3992

What does this mean? Well, there’s no statistically significant relationship between year or ONI and the amount of snow that falls over the course of a Fairbanks winter. I ran the same analysis against precipitation data and got the same non-result. This doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a relationship, just that my analysis didn’t have the ability to find it. Perhaps aggregating all the data into a six month “winter” was a mistake, or there’s some temporal offset between colder ocean temperatures and increased precipitation in Fairbanks. Or maybe La Niña really doesn’t affect precipitation in Fairbanks like it does in Oregon and Washington.

Bummer. The good news is that the analysis didn’t show La Niña is associated with lower snowfall in Fairbanks, so we can still hope for a high snow year. We just can’t hang those hopes on La Niña, should it come to pass.

Since I’ve already got the data, I wanted to test the hypothesis that a low ONI (a La Niña year) is related to colder winter temperatures in Fairbanks. Here’s that analysis performed against the average minimum temperature in Fairbanks (similar results were found with maximum and average temperature):

R> model <- lm(t_min ~ winter_year + nino_index, data = result)
R> summary(model)

Call:
lm(formula = t_min ~ winter_year + nino_index, data = result)

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max
-10.5987  -3.0283  -0.8838   3.0117  10.9808

Coefficients:
              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -209.07111   70.19056  -2.979  0.00422 **
winter_year    0.10278    0.03547   2.898  0.00529 **
nino_index     1.71415    0.68388   2.506  0.01502 *
—
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 4.802 on 58 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.2343,     Adjusted R-squared: 0.2079
F-statistic: 8.874 on 2 and 58 DF,  p-value: 0.0004343

The results of the analysis show a significant relationship between ONI index and the average minimum temperature in Fairbanks. The relationship is positive, which means that when the ONI index is low (La Niña), winter temperatures in Fairbanks will be colder. In addition, there’s a strong (and significant) positive relationship between year and temperature, indicating that winter temperatures in Fairbanks have increased by an average of 0.1 degrees per year over the period between 1950 and 2009. This is a local result and can’t really speak to hypotheses regarding global climate change, but it does support the idea that the effect of global climate change is increasing winter temperatures in our area.

One other note: the model that includes both year and ONI, while significant, explains a little over 20% of the variation in winter temperature. There’s a lot more going on (including simple randomness) in Fairbanks winter temperature than these two variables. Still, it’s a good bet that we’re going to have a cold winter if La Niña materializes.

Thanks to Rich and his blog for provoking an interest in how El Niño/La Niña might affect us in Fairbanks.

tags: la niña  R  statistics  weather  winter 
sat, 13-dec-2008, 16:43

Heat gun, vent pipe

Heat gun, vent pipe

Last winter our vent pipe froze solid and I spent a couple hours in the attic with a heat gun melting the blockage. A couple days ago I noticed that flushing the toilet was pulling water out of the traps in the sink and bathtub, so I knew the vent was getting plugged again. My attempt at a fix over the summer was to put a larger pipe over the vent on the roof so the condensation might happen in the outer pipe, which could be easily removed and cleaned out. Unfortunately, when I got up on the roof today, not only was it impossible to get the outer pipe free, but the growing constriction wasn’t in the outer pipe anyway. Mid-summer my neighbor suggested replacing the section of the vent in the attic with a much larger diameter pipe (6” was his suggestion) and then insulating it. I never got around to it; almost frozen vent pipe; a priori.

The total freezing degree days to this point in the winter season has been 2,258, which ought to give me a pretty good way of estimating when I’ll have another problem. Thus far we’ve had 74 days with an average daily temperature below freezing, and the average temperature for those days was 1.4°F. That’s below normal for the year: nine of the last eleven weeks have been below average. But the heart of the winter is approaching, so it’ll take many fewer than 74 days to double our freezing degree days for the season.

My first attempt to fix the clog was to insert a heat gun into the clean out and let the warm air from the heat gun melt it (shown in the photo). I don’t think this had any real effect. I kept it going for a little over an hour, monitoring the backside of the pipe to make sure the heat gun wasn’t melting it. But it was around -10°F this morning, so I’ll bet the hot air was pretty cold by the time it rose to the ice. The second attempt was using a pipe snake from up on the roof, but it couldn’t go past the constriction, and even if it had, I’m not sure it really would have cleared out much ice. Finally, I dragged a five gallon bucket filled with hot water up onto the roof. I got about three gallons into the vent before it was filled to the top. At first I was nervous that this wasn’t going to work and I’d have three gallons of water turning to ice in the vent, but the water started dropping slowly, and after a minute, the blockage gave way and hot water came plunging down the pipe. I poured the final gallon or two through the pipe, and came down off the roof.

Tomorrow I’ll put some 2” fiberglass insulation around the part of the pipe that’s exposed in the attic, which should help. And I’ll be keeping my eye on the total freezing degree days for the rest of the winter. Once it gets up to 4,000, I may want to go back up on the roof with another bucket of hot water.

SQL query from my weather database: SELECT sum(32.0 - t_avg::double precision) FROM daily;
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