Climate & Weather Data Analysis in Excel

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn 59 days of station readings into monthly statistics: the month of each date, the daily mean temperature, the monthly mean, the monthly precipitation total and the number of wet days.
• Calculate the 1991–2020 climate normal of the station's annual mean temperature, the anomaly of every year from 1991 to 2025, chart the anomalies and count the warm years of the last decade.
• Fit a linear trend to the 1991–2025 annual temperatures, express it in °C per decade, extend it to 2030 and draw a line chart with a trendline.
• For September at Alder Ridge you calculate the daily heating and cooling degree days, their monthly totals and an estimate of the heating energy for the board's office.
• For July at Alder Ridge you count hot days and tropical nights, build a running counter of consecutive dry days, find the longest dry spell and the date of the hottest day.
• Smooth 30 years of annual precipitation with a 5-year centred running mean, compare decadal averages with AVERAGEIFS and find the wettest 5-year period.
• Rank 30 annual maximum daily rainfalls, estimate each one's exceedance probability and return period with the Weibull plotting position, and calculate the chance of a 30-year event during a 10-year project.
• Convert a week of readings from a partner station that reports in US units to °C, mm and m/s, and estimate the heat index with the National Weather Service's simple formula.