Saturday, April 23, 2011

Arkansas unavailable - hopefully just a short break on the temperature study

How long should a government run website be down? I ask because I was getting ready to download the data for the continuing study of state temperatures on Friday, intending to download the statistics from the USHCN network for Arkansas, and then compile the data, plot the curves, and write the post today. Unfortunately when I went to the site through which I go to get to where the data is:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ushcn_map_interface.html

my laptop got a notice that:


Well without the data, it is hard to do any analysis. I presumed that it was a transient glitch, and went off to do other things. Came back this evening (after driving through the driving snow to Dartmouth College at noon) and got the same message, about a day later. So I went back to the NASA main website for climate change at GISS, and clicked on the:

http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/newushcn.html

pointer and got the same message. (Which is also where the NOAA folk tell you to go and look).


The long way around would be to download the names of the Arkansas state stations from the Surface Stations website and then go to the GISS site, and download the data from there. Unfortunately that would only provide the homogenized data for the stations (as I found in an earlier state) not the TOBS data, which correlates better with the geographical information and population.

So I will presume that this is just a temporary problem at the site, and that, after the Easter Weekend is over, perhaps the server will be put back on line, and I can get back in business.

For now, Happy Easter, and my apologies.

Oh, a small update, I (out of curiosity) entered one of the file data references that I have used before to see if I could get around the problem that way, and got the information that:

Safari can't find the server "cdiac.csd.ornl.gov

Which was where it came from - wonder what's going on??

No comments:

Post a Comment