Exploring Glacier Data

In order to see our project's process through our Jupyter Notebook, "Project_Workbook.ipynb", download the following files:

• glims_original.csv
• LatLong_GLIMS.csv
• wgi_original.csv
• Project_Workbook.ipynb

Megan Byers & Chloe Bruce

Summary:

We plan to analyze glacier data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. We hope to observe trends in glacier size and also examine other climate data to see if we can find correlations. So far, we have been working on exploratory data analysis using plots and summary statistics. We also plan to learn more about the source(s) of our data and what is being collected, since all of the data sets contain variables with measurements we do not fully understand.

Techniques:

The technique we have used so far is exploring the data in Python using Pandas. We are looking for packages so we can work with a database file (.dbf), since the datasets we’ve found are in this format. We’ve also gone through many government websites looking for more climate data that may be relevant to our project – in terms of time periods, locations, and frequency of data entries.

Goals:

For rest of the semester, we want to look for trends in glacier size, use regression to fit these trends, make projections into the future, and look for correlations to other environmental data (possibly temperature, sea level, air quality, and/or snowpack). We hope to experience the process of working with real data that is not necessarily clean and may be challenging to work with. We are interested in the findings we can extract from these data and further prove that our environment is on the decline (we already knew this).