As a guy who has vegetable and flower gardens this is great information. 
Planting to early can cause low yield as well as frost damage. I keep 
the deer and rabbits out with a fence, the frost is a little tougher to 
work with ;-)
I'm not a UNIX/Linux expert but I gain so much knowledge about 
UNIX/Linux from being on the list and then every once in a while a gem 
comes along like you have sent.

Thanks
Sam.

Mike Miller wrote:

> Thought some of you would be interested. There is a little unix worked 
> in here...
>
> I have a lot of temperature data in a giant file. I think I got it by 
> grabbing a bunch of different files on the web and putting them 
> together. They are from a legitimate source. In case you want to see 
> the file, it is here:
>
> http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/temperature/all_temps.txt
>
> That tells me all the temperature highs and lows for every day for the 
> 99 years from January 1, 1900 to December 31, 1998. Using that file 
> and some neat computer tricks, I put together the table below about 
> last frosts for every spring for all 99 years. The earliest final 
> frost was on April 7, but that only happened once. In 25% of years, 
> the last frost was on April 22 or earlier. In 50% of years the last 
> frost was on April 28 or earlier. It's really only safe to plant after 
> May 24, but it's 90% safe after May 15. I'd say that if our weather 
> forecast predicts no cold weather for a few days, you can be safe even 
> a little earlier.
>
> On Sunday afternoon our 103-year-old neighbor told us there would be 
> no more frost this year. He also called me "Tom" so I have to wonder 
> if he was thinking clearly. I'd say that we have about a 90% chance of 
> at least one more frost before summer.
>
> Mike
>
>
> tail +12 all_temps.txt | head -36159 | gawk '$2 < 8 && $5 < 33 {print 
> $0}' > junk
>
> # in tcsh shell:
>
> foreach year ( `seq 1900 1998` )
> grep ^$year junk | tail -1 >>! junk_2
> end
>
> gawk '{print $2" "$3}' junk_2 | numalign | sort -n | uniq -c | perl 
> -pe 's/^ (.) (.) (..)$/ $1 $2\/$3/' > ! output.txt
>
> numalign is here:
> http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/misc
>
>
> Last Spring Frosts for Years 1900-1998
> ========================================
> Frequency Date Chance of No More Frost
> --------- ---- -----------------------
> 1 4/ 7
> 1 4/ 8
> 2 4/ 9
> 1 4/10 5%
> 1 4/11
> 1 4/12
> 1 4/13
> 1 4/14
> 2 4/15 10%
> 1 4/19
> 3 4/20
> 4 4/21
> 6 4/22 25%
> 4 4/23
> 5 4/24
> 2 4/25
> 5 4/26
> 6 4/27
> 3 4/28 50%
> 1 4/29
> 3 4/30
> 4 5/ 1
> 4 5/ 2
> 5 5/ 3 67%
> 1 5/ 5
> 3 5/ 6
> 3 5/ 7
> 1 5/ 8 75%
> 2 5/ 9
> 3 5/10
> 4 5/12
> 4 5/13
> 3 5/15 90%
> 1 5/16
> 2 5/17
> 1 5/18 95%
> 1 5/20
> 1 5/22
> 1 5/23
> 1 5/24 99%
>
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