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Session 2793

Object Oriented Analysis of Weather Data in Virginia

Steven Thomas, Vinod Lohani, Bevlee Watford

Senior, Computer Engineering/Assistant Professor, Engineering Fundamentals/Director, Minority Engineering Program, Virginia Tech

Abstract

An object-oriented approach is presented to analyze drought patterns in Virginia using probabilistic analysis of long - term weather data (i.e. Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI)). The study is a part of an undergraduate research project, funded by the office of the Minority Engineering program under a VT-GE program, at Virginia Tech. The purpose of the program is to encourage and support the efforts of under-represented engineering students to seek graduate degrees. The present paper describes research work of one of the current VT-GE scholars.

1.0 Introduction

Object oriented approach has not found many applications in analyzing hydrology and water resources problems. It may be attributed to non-exposure of professionals working in these areas to object oriented programming languages like C++. This fact is also evident from analysis of papers that were presented in recent national level conferences, organized by the ASCE, in hydrology and water resources area. The 1999 conference in Arizona had only 4 papers out of 264 presentations that used the object oriented approach. In the 2000 conference in Minnesota, this ratio was 6 out of 509 papers and in 2001 conference in Orlando, only 5 out of 443 presentations made use of this powerful programming technique1 .

The paper presents results of an ongoing undergraduate research project that has objective to analyze long- term weather records using an object oriented approach. The first author is pursuing an undergraduate degree in computer engineering at Virginia Tech. The computer engineering curriculum includes several courses that require students to learn and use object oriented programming languages like C++. The problem solving potential of the programming languages can be effectively realized by analyzing real world data, available from the Internet, for meaningful conclusions. Availability of long term weather data over the Internet definitely offers potential in this direction. Such efforts can also meet the need to have inquiry based education for undergraduates as has been proposed by a national level commission in its recent report2 .

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Thomas, S., & Lohani, V., & Watford, B. (2002, June), Object Oriented Analysis Of Weather Data In Virginia Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10479