The big project I did this month is starting to analyze all the data in the Nino 3.4 box. This data goes all the way back to the year 1870, so it was quite a lot to do. My mentor sent me a chart which contained all this data and wanted me to mark the occurrences of El Nino and La Nina in the file to see what the index looks like. If the data value in December was greater than 1, we considered it an El Nino year. If the data value in December was less than 1, it was considered a La Nina year. I went through all the data and highlighted all the El Nino years red and La Nina years blue. For clarity, El Nino is warmer than normal sea temperature while La Nina is cooler than normal sea temperature. After doing this, I looked for any patterns. For example, an ideal pattern would have been if every year the temperature alternated between El Nino and La Nino. Unfortunately, there was no clear pattern in this regard. This was expected, so it's not a major problem. Next, I looked at something called the spring trend.
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My goals for September were to download and familiarize myself with mathematica and visit Dartmouth to meet with my mentor. I was able to achieve both of these goals! This month I was working specifically on figuring out ways to specialize my project more. For example, my mentor and I had to figure out which Nino box to examine. "Boxes" are different regions. Each of these regions have numbers assigned to them. We decided to focus our research on the Nino 3.4 box because it gives good measures of changes in sea surface temperature. I have attached a picture of the Nino 3.4 box for clarity. Now since we restricted our study to the 3.4 box, we will only be analyzing the data in that specific region. I have downloaded data ranging back to 1870 and am excited to see what I will find!
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