These files are for a graphics competition to be held in January 2006. See THIS LINK for details.

The basic idea is to summarize the data graphically in the "best" way possible. It might be a fun thing to try your hand at.

Documentation for the data is found at THIS LINK.

The file read.files.R contains some R code to read these data sets into R. To use these functions, download them into R with this command:

  source("http://wiener.math.csi.cuny.edu/verzani/classes/MTH410/GraphicsCompetition/read.files.R") 

Then to grab the second temperature file, you can do

  x = read.files(name="temperature",number=2) 

A contour plot shows some information:

 contour(x) 

To grab all the temperature data, you can do:

 x = readAsZOOObject(name="temperature") 

(You need the zoo package installed here)

A plot of the first 10 time series can be had with

 plot(x[,1:10]) 

For those who prefer Fahrenheit over Kelvin, we have

 KtoF = function(x) 9/5*(x-273)+32 plot(KtoF(x[,1:10])) 

The zoo object makes plots easy. An array is a bit more convenient for storing the data.

 a = zooObjectToArray(x) contour(as.numeric(dimnames(a)[[1]]),27:50, a[,1,])