<u> Work Experience - James Bellamy </u>
Work Experience at Lancaster University
My name is James Bellamy and I am in the 5th Year at Lancaster Royal Grammar School .
During October 2000, I worked in the Environmental Science Department of Lancaster University
My work at the university was focussed around two main tasks. The first of these tasks
was to collect data at Hazelrigg Weather Station, which took place every morning. The second task
was to create weather graphs for year 2000 data and post it on my own web page.
Hazelrigg Weather Station
The daily meteorological reading begins at around 7.30 a.m., which duly meant I had to wake up at around 6.30 a.m. On the first Monday of my work experience,
Martin and I braved the atrocious weather to carry out my first daily weather observation. This was no easy task. Biros have a tendancy to stop working in the
pouring rain, so the data was recorded in the faint scribblings of pencil. There was a whole manner of meteorological
devices in the field, which only served to keep us outside for longer! There are a few electronic instruments at the station, however many require manual observation. The data collection
involves taking readings from a variety of equipment. There are four types of rain guages: the modified altar, turf wall,
east guage, and the west guage. There were also twelve thermometers: dry bulb; wet bulb; maximum; minimum (all within the Stevenson's Screen),
thermometers at 10, 20, 30, 50 and 100cm depth within the ground, a minimum and maximum grass and a minimum concrete thermometers.
In addition, there is a Campbell-Stokes sun recorder which must be changed promptly at 8.30 a.m. Within the station itself, there is a barometer, electronic
sun recorder and elctronic wind vain. However, the two of us survived and returned to the warmth of the weather station, to transfer the data into the weather diaries and also onto the
the University's network. Despite the awful weather at present we could look forward to
a couple of weeks of settled weather. This did indeed hold true, and with the the guidance of Martin Beadle , the Weather
Station supervisor, I was able to carry out daily observation on my own, by the end of the week.
Creating my own web page
During the afternoons, with extensive guidance from Dr. R Mackenzie and Beverly Whittaker, I managed to created weather graphs of the current year and a web-page to post them on.
The updating of weather graphs largely involved the use of Matlab (very complicated)
and becoming familiar with the university network. Despite being familiar with Windows 95, (to a lesser extent Windows 3.1),
and Excel, grasping different versions of Matlab on three different types of computer was no easy task! Matlab is a program which reads data and is able to put
it into a table or graph format. To do this, the progamming files had to be adjusted so year 2000 data could
be read. Using a number of command codes, this data was shown on a graph and then printed to another drive.
To be able to access this information, a web page was created. Learning the basics of HTML web pages
allowed me post these weather graphs (below).
I'd like to say thankyou very much to all the staff at the Environmental Science Department, namely Dr. Rob Mackenzie, Martin Beadle, Iris Dootson and Beverly Whittaker.
Without their tireless efforts, I would not have learned so much as I have. The routine at the weather station gave me first hand experience of practical sceintific research and the knowledege I
gained in the processing of the data collected, fulfilled my main aim: to give me an insight and understanding in to different aspects of computers (particularly Matlab, programming and and web page construction).
Average Monthly Temperatures 2000
Monthly Rainfall 2000
Monthly Sun Hours 2000
Average Monthly Temperatures 1999
Monthly Rainfall 1999
Monthly Sun Hours 1999
Guide to how I created graphs using MATLAB (Shown in Word)
Guide to how I created graphs using Matlab (Shown as a text file)
