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% > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >