Mackay Minutes 2016/09/15

MacKay website, and minutes

How did we do on our todo list?

• All:
  • Check out some links:
    • Climate of Nova Scotia
    • Early Spring Flowering in Nova Scotia
      • "Flowering onset in the temperate region is determined mainly by temperature (Miller-Rushing and Primack 2008); soil moisture levels and precipitation do not appear to be a limiting factor in most years."
    • Instruction for downloading bulk meteorology data
    • Climate Atlas
    • Historical Data
    • Nova Scotia Topo Map
    • http://herbarium.acadiau.ca
      • Nova Scotia Plants
    • From Tracking climate change with the help of Henry David Thoreau/:
      • https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/image/0020/32366/Figure-1.png
      • https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/image/0009/32040/Figure-2.jpg
    • Global Warming and Flowering Times in Thoreau's Concord: A Community Perspective -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18409423

• Andy:
  • I'll get Laura the values of the vectors in the tensor outer product, so that she can check for lat/long regression of region vector, and meteorological regressions, if possible.
  • I'll look at 1907, 1917, and 1921, to see if there was anything exceptional in the MacKay reports (or elsewhere).
  • I'll be looking for more meteorological data from Teresa, and checking with her contact suggested in her last email.

• Madison:
  • We need a graphic with the (nine) regions of Nova Scotia
  • Both Madison and Laura will be working on the abstract for the poster competition
  • Madison will check on the 1915 and 1920 data, to see why it appears that becoming common seems earlier than first appearance.

• Laura:
  • check for lat/long regression of region vector, and meteorological regressions, if possible, of the yearly .
  • Both Madison and Laura will be working on the abstract for the poster competition

• Steve: off the hook

The Readings

The Climate of Nova Scotia (from The Climate of Canada).

Moving forward

• Poster Session Deadline approaches in October...
• Talk for the MAA:

Pioneering Climate Science and Data Analysis: the work of Alexander MacKay (1848-1929)

in the category of

Interdisciplinary Topics in Mathematics (Statistics, linear algebra, GIS, Botany, climate science)

in the contributed papers section.

Our objective would be to

1. Describe MacKay as a brilliant quantitative scientist, and his citizen science project (Andy)
2. Describe the summary data, and how we found it; associated data (e.g. climatological data); and problems we encountered, how we solved them, etc. (Madison)
3. Describe climate-related discoveries so far (Laura).

http://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm2017/2180_maacall

Todo for next week

• All:
  • Read The Climate of Nova Scotia

• Andy:
  • Continue with TSVD analysis
  • Prepare and submit abstract for MAA talk
  • Get vector components to Laura for regression analysis

• Madison:
  • Keep working the GIS component
  • Take care of checking data for errors
  • Look for errors in 1915

• Laura:
  • Perform regressions on TSVD vectors
  • Get early spring averages and try a regression on the yearly component

• Steve:
  • will look into how to animate the FAT and the model predictions in R

Next meeting

Thursday, 9/22, 3:00