Description

This lesson will lead users through working with a portion of a data set that is collected by the National Climatic Data Center at a system of monitoring locations across the US. The data include drought indices that represent a biologically relevant and important ecological variable. Upon completion of the lesson, students will be prepared to design their own data exploration projects, which involve obtaining data from a source online (typically from a repository) and asking their own questions of the data.

Specifically, students will:

• Review / interpret metadata and data headers
• Screen data for missing values, understand how they’re coded, and separate them from meaningful data values
• Plot data over time
• Interpret the data and form new questions for future analyses 

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