Climate change affects our weather, which in turn impacts many people and industries in different ways. People who are particularly susceptible to weather changes can use technology to help monitor

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES

ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS

Drought Detection Goal

Climate change affects our weather, which in turn impacts many people and industries in different ways. People who are particularly susceptible to weather changes can use technology to help monitor and predict weather situations that can negatively affect their businesses or livelihoods. In this lab, we are going to look at the beginnings of how you can write programs to analyze weather data to compute basic statistics--numerical summaries that are the foundation of predictive models.

Here, we are going to focus on rainfall and drought conditions, which influence many communities in different ways. You may have read about recent drought situations in different areas of this country, or on other continents. But while we all have an idea of what a drought is, it can actually be hard to measure. While droughts are caused by complex and interrelated issues, one of the main underlying forces is the availability of water. Lack of rainfall naturally reduces the amount of water available in an area, which can lead to meteorological drought One reason to do this is because some communities, particularly farming communities, can be significantly affected by drought, and farmers wish to monitor signs of impending drought conditions. One of the main indexes used to identify (or predict) drought compares accumulated rainfall amounts against historical averages. This information matters in many places in the world.

 

For example, in East Africa, many countries (and many families) depend heavily on agriculture and might see huge impacts from drought. That region includes many farms that produce coffee and tea--in fact, Kenya is the world's third-biggest exporter of tea (behind China and India). However, the tea industry in this region includes a significant number of small, independently operated farms. These small farms operate season to season and do not have the financial resources to survive the damage that can occur if an entire season's crops are destroyed. For individuals operating these farms, their lives depend on the weather.

Read the following two (brief) articles for more background:

While working on this assignment, think about how a drought where you live would affect you and your family. Also think about how it might affect a small, family-owned tea farm in Kenya, and what would be similar to or different from the local effects in the area where you live. Finally, think about what would be necessary to beyond the simple data reading/processing in this assignment to create a practical tool for drought identification.

Starting Materials

You have an option of either creating all your classes from scratch or downloading program3.zip file which contains the skeleton code for the main classes.

Real Weather Data

Your assignment is driven by real-world weather data collected from weather observation stations. It is possible to get this information from various sources online, including NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (see their Climate Data Online      (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/) web site). Here, we will be using some data collected from actual weather stations in Kenya. From NOAA's data sources, we've compiled daily summary information from weather station observations into a text format for you to use. The text file looks like this (but a lot longer):

 

KE000063612	3.117   35.617 515	2/10/16 0.04	87	98	73
KE000063820	-4.033 39.617 55	4/25/16 0	88	101	75
...

 

Each line in this text file represents the information from a single day at a single weather station. Each "word"

represents a separate piece of information. You'll be reading this input using a             so you can use            ,

, or                      to read individual data values from the line.

 

Each line contains 9 separate values, with whitespace in between. These are:

 

Name	Type	Example	Meaning
Station ID	text	KE000063612	The weather station's identifier (a unique name)
Latitude	floating point	3.117	The latitude of the weather station's location
Longitude	floating point	35.617	The longitude of the weather station's location
Altitude	integer	515	The elevation at the weather station's location (in feet)
Date	text	4/25/16	The date for this daily summary, in m/d/yy format

 

 

Name	Type	Example	Meaning
Precipitation	floating point	0.04	The total rainfall for that day
Avg Temp	integer	87	The average (mean) temperature for that day (in degrees Fahrenheit)
Max Temp	integer	98	The high temperature for that day
Min Temp	integer	73	The low temperature for that day

 

Note that some records use -1 as a value when data is missing in the precipitation or temperature fields. Such -1 values should be ignored in those positions.

Of these, in this assignment we will only use: the station ID, the month (which you can extract from the date using

), and the precipitation amount. The other values may be relevant in a more advanced drought identification process (for example, temperature information allows one to account for evaporation rate, which allows for more accurate models than those using rainfall alone).

At the same time, though, you can rely on all 9 values being present on every line. That may simplify the process of reading data from the input source.

Two example weather data files you can look at are:

 

 Kenya-short.txt    (http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs1114/Kenya-short.txt) : a really small file containing 5 weather summaries from 2 different weather stations in Kenya. Useful for looking at the format, or for simple software tests.

 Kenya-2014-2016.txt    (http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs1114/Kenya-2014-2016.txt) : a full file containing all available weather summaries from all weather stations in Kenya for 2014-2016.

However, when creating software tests for your solution, you can create your own test records directly inside your test cases, without using separate files (see the Java I/O tutorial for how to set up a Scanner with input text for testing).

Classes You Create

For this assignment, you will create three classes.

 

WeatherStation

This class represents the basic statistics collected by one weather observation station. Internally, a weather station should use an array to hold 12 monthly rain totals that represent the sum of precipitation numbers for all the days reported in that month. It should also use a separate array to hold 12 monthly counts that represent the number of daily records that have been processed for that month. Note that month numbers are passed into methods and returned as values between 1-12, even though your arrays are indexed starting at zero

Attachments:

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