Graduating senior David A. Cavaceci has taken the lessons of  Spring 2009 Meteorology Career Days to heart and developed his own independent study program in weather data system development.  Under the supervision of Professor George S. Young, David designed and implemented a software system to acquire, analyze, and publish climate data in realtime. 

Based on the suggestions of industry leaders, David used Perl, Fortran, and Visual Basic for Applications to implement, respectively, the data acquisition, data analysis, and results visualization portions of his system.   He also used Perl to orchestrate the entire multi-program system for realtime operation. 

His automated analysis of State College climate observations of maximum and minimum temperature revealed long-term trends in the length of runs of above and below average temperature. 

These results are all the more notable because a moving 30-year mean was used to define the average, so these results are distinct from any long-term changes in the average maximum and minimum temperatures at State College. 

The largest changes in the duration of hot and cold spells occurred in conjunction with the onset of the dustbowl years in the 1930s.

David Cavaceci's independent study program can be viewed by visiting: http://personal.psu.edu/dac5039/sc/index.html

Kudos on a job well done David!