With the publication of Hansen2010 forthcoming it is critical to examine the subject afresh. The global temperature index product from NASA is known as GISSTEMP .GISSTEMP, like the temperature index from Hadley/CRU and NCDC attempts to estimate the average temperature of the globe using historical data archived in the GHCN ( Global Climate Historical Network) 
Kuwait International airport. Giss has it as nightlights =0, so do I. By looking at comparisons of nightlights with the station centered and a static google map with the station centered, there are mismatches between GISS and Me and between Nightlights and the world. Subtle shift here and there. Annoying. Also, you can see 
I am continuing the investigation of nightlights using some additional packages from Cran. Here we add Rgooglemaps to the mix. Rgooglemaps is a neat tool that gives you a simple ( needs better docs) interface to the static map server. Perhaps, I’ll modify the code to my likeing, so For now I use it as 
It's the Monday of the Columbus Day weekend here, so I must have been running a Chicago Marathon yesterday. Indeed -- the 34th annual Chicago Marathon took place yesterday but everything was about its 10/10/10 date. The symmetric set of numbers was i...
"The R-Files" is an occasional series from Revolution Analytics, where we profile prominent members of the R Community. Name: Saptarshi Guha Background: Ph.D. in Statistics, Purdue University Nationality: India Years Using R: 6 Known for: Developing RHIPE package for R + Hadoop integration At just 31 years old, Saptarshi Guha has emerged as a cutting-edge contributor to the R...
Update: Some are not aware that GISS has switched to using Nightlights in the ROW. According to their updates they have moved to nightlights for the ROW. The station inventories can be found here The station I examine below is listed like this in the new giss inventory 20551495001 TURPAN 42.92 91.00 24 384R -9MVDEno-9x-9HOT 
Update: the competition was just launched. * * * What is the competition about? Drew Conway and John Myles Whyte have collected data from (52) R users about the packages they have installed. The data is now available on github for download and the contest will be run on the kaggle platform. For more details,
Those who follow the discussions about UHI understand that “nightlights” plays a large role in defining whether or not a station is considered Rural or Urban. In the work of GISS nightlights are determined by looking at the DSMP product. The product is available in 30 arcsecond format. That’s .00833 degrees. The following issue arises. 
This is Part 1 of a five-part article series, with new parts published each Thursday. You can download the complete article from the Revolution Analytics website. How Did a Statistical Programming Language Invented in New Zealand Become a Global Sensation? Much in the same way that social networking, reality TV and craft beer were considered marginal fads before gaining...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
