APPLYING DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS TO TEACHING THE REGIONAL CLASSIFICATION OF CLIMATE

This article describes an exercise for college undergraduate and high school students which relates descriptive statistics measuring central tendency and dispersion to the regional classification of climate. In the exercise students are assigned a set of mean monthly temperature and precipitation statistics for 65 weather stations throughout the co nterminous United States. Mean annual temperature and precipitation an d their standard deviations are computed for each weather station. The se statistics are used to construct two scatter plots of means and sta ndard deviations for both temperature and precipitation. Clusters of p oints within each scatter plot are then identified to form climatic ca tegories for temperature and precipitation, which are mapped out into temperature and precipitation regions. These maps are overlayed to pro duce a composite climatic region map. The open-ended nature of the exe rcise forces students to struggle with the regional classification pro blem in geography which is not always clearly defined and simple to re solve.