Do Spring and Summer Climates Correlate?

By Kellie Dean and Alex Pherribo

This year we were chosen to participate in an internship with the N.C. State Climate Office after school every Tuesday. Our sciece teacher chose a selection of people and interviewed them to figure out which people should go to the climate office or the GIS place or even the ASDA. Us plus two other people, Jamie and Anna, were chosen to go to the N.C. State Climate Office.

The first thing that we did was read the webpage for the N.C. State Climate Office and discuss what we had learned. After we did that we came up with a couple of questions we wanted to answer, and chose two from the list. We then split up into two groups. Our question was Does climate in the Spring predict climate in the Summer. The hypothesis that we came up with was that the weather in the Spring did predict the weather in the Summer. After we had decided on a hypothesis, we began to gather the data for our research.

1. We chose Asheville, RDU, and Wilmington for the cities that we wanted to study. Asheville in the mountains region, RDU in the piedmont, and Wilmington in the Coastal Plains region.
2. Used the CIRRUS database to find the monthly precipitation and temperature data for the three cities. We copied each page of information and pasted it into Microsoft Excel. After this we singled out the months for Spring and Summer and put them in seperate columns to find out the average for them. After that we highlighted them and created a graph to see if there was a visual correlation between the two seasons.
3. To achieve an exact correlation for the seasons, we used the formula for correlation, which is =CORREL(data set here). This confirmed that there was no correlation between the average temperatures and the average precipitaion.
4. After finishing the data finding that we were supposed to do we made a powerpoint presentation to show our findings and our hypothesis.

Click Here to see the Precipitation for Asheville

Click here to see the Temperature data for Asheville

Click here to see the Precipitation data for RDU

Click here to see the Temperature data for RDU

Click here to see the Precipitation data for Wilmington

Click here to see the Temperature data for Wilmington