Conclusions
The statewide average solar radiation correlations we had for our experiment were:
Air
Temperature: 0.363050199
Relative
Humidity: -0.491531947
Soil
Temperature: 0.160029459
When
calculating correlations, values that are close to +1 or -1 indicates that the
data sets are well correlated. Unfortunately our values are closer to zero, which means that solar
radiation is not well correlated with air temperature, relative humidity, and
soil temperature. Overall, relative
humidity had the best correlation and soil temperature had the worst when
compared to solar radiation.
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Future Work
There
are a number of things that could be done to improve the overall results of a
similar project in the future. One way to get more accurate statistics is to
use more data. That can mean more years of data, or data from more stations.
In
addition, when we pulled all observations we were not able to easily see what
was good or bad data until we graphed it. In some cases, we had to completely
throw out a station because of the amount of bad data. If we were to use
quality controlled data in the future, then we could easily neglect the bogus
observations individually without having to leave out an entire station.
Since
solar radiation is not measured at very many stations across the state, it
might also be worthwhile to compare estimated solar radiation to weather
measurements at stations other than ECONET.