Wine PhD

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

I woke up this morning to a beautiful, crisp, clear Thanksgiving morning. Perfect for cooking. It led me to wonder how many nice Thanksgiving days Davis has had in the last 20 or so years. Fortunately for me, I have just the tool.

Below is the historical record of Thanksgiving weather attributes in Davis since 1985. Most striking to me is how cold the Thanksgiving of 1993 was. I asked Antonia if she remembered it (she lived here when she was a child) and she did remember there to be one extremely cold Thanksgiving of her youth.

26ºF is cold!

1991 was windy and dry.
1985 was cold and wet and dark.

I will venture a guess that 1985 was the least enjoyable Thanksgiving, based on weather, in the range plotted.
1995 looked nice, but maybe a little too warm for a Fall holiday sitting on the cusp of December.

R code:

#load required packages
library(cimis)
library(lattice)
library(reshape)

# get historical weather data
year = as.character(1985:2008)
w = lapply(year, function(x)cimisannual("006", x))
w = do.call("rbind", w)

#Subset Thanksgiving
w2 = w[months(w$datetime, abb=T) == "Nov",]

#Subset Thursdays
w3 = w2[as.POSIXlt(w2$datetime)$wday == 4,]

#Get 4th Thursday
wthanks = do.call(rbind, lapply(split(w3, w3$year), function(x)x[4,]))

#subset data, set into long
wthanks.long = melt(wthanks[, c(3:16, 18)], id.var = "year")

#chart
barchart(value~as.factor(year) | variable,
	scales = list(y=list(relation="free"),
		x=list(rot=90, cex=.5, relation="free")),
	data = wthanks.long,
	par.strip.text=list(cex=.7, lines=1),
	main="Historical Davis Thanksgiving Weather")