A Statistical Examination of the Climatic Human Expert System, The Sunset Garden Zones for California

Twentieth Century climatology was dominated by two great figures: Wladamir Köppen and C. Warren Thornthwaite. The first carefully developed climatic parameters to match the larger world vegetation communities. The second developed complex formulas of "Moisture Factors" that provided efficient understanding of how evapotranspiration influences plant growth and health, both for native and non-native communities. In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, the Sunset Magazine Corporation develop a purely empirical set of Garden Zones, first for California, then for the thirteen states of the West, now for the entire nation in the National Garden Maps. The Sunset Garden Zones are well recognized and respected in Western States for illustrating the several factors of climate that distinguish zones. But the Sunset Garden Zones have never before been digitized and examined statistically for validation of their demarcations. This thesis examines the digitized zones with reference to PRISM climate data. Variable coverages resembling those described by Sunset are extracted from the PRISM data. These variable coverages are collected for two buffered areas, one in northern California and one in southern California. The coverages are exported from ArcGIS 9.1 to SAS® where they are processed first through a Principal Component Analysis, and then the first five principal components are entered into a Ward's Hierarchical Cluster Analysis. The resulting clusters were translated back into ArcGIS as a raster coverage, where the clusters were climatic regions. This process is quite amenable for further examination of other regions of California

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Geography

Department dc:contributor.department

Geography

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Logan, Ben

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Campbell, James B. Jr.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Boyer, John D.
• Kennedy, Lisa M.
• Buikema, Arthur L. Jr.

• Sunset Garden Zones
• Climate
• Principal Component Analysis
• California
• Cluster Analysis

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

etd-05082006-113632

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/32371