I’ve been playing around with Google Spreadsheets today and I’m slightly impressed. Not at the usability, as that still needs a bit of work. But rather at the data grabbing functions.
We’ve had a few hot days in a row here and I was wondering how the summer compared to last year’s. So I made a Google Spreadsheet that, using the ImportData function, pulls the max. and min. temperatures straight of the CSV’s on the BOM website and makes them into a nice graph. The best part is, when the BOM adds new data, my Google Spreadsheet will be automatically updated. There are also functions to grab data from HTML and XML web sources, but I figured the CSV would be the the most reliable and most consistently formatted.
The chart uses a 7-day rolling average to smooth out the data and better visualise the trends, taking the 7 days either side of the actual date. Graphing the raw data was all spiky and didn’t mean much. Conclusions? Um I’m not sure. The current heat-wave is nothing compared to the one we had around New Years; I’m glad I was out of town.
View the temperature chart here. I also made a chart of the delta’s between summers. I added a best fit line (after *much* googling) and it slopes up. Does this mean our summers are getting hotter? Or because it’s below zero on the y-axis does that mean that on average this summer is cooler than the last? I’m not a stats whiz.
Learn about the import functions here.
