Winter - Where Do They Go

[gigantor]

Found the dataset, I guess I can let the user choose the appropriate weather station for whatever area is being analyzed...   they even provide the gps coordinates of each station and a google earth file.

 

Shoot, they have hourly data points for each station!

 

https://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/geoportal/catalog/search/resource/details.page?id=gov.noaa.ncdc:C00684

 

 

[BobbyO]

On 13 January 2017 at 7:22 AM, gigantor said:

I wonder what the average altitude is for sightings in winter....  if its lower elevations, they may simply descend to a less hostile environment.

 

You've got to be splitting up geographically IMO, members will be distorted otherwise from Colorado to Florida etc.

[Lake County Bigfooot]

Certainly elevation seems to play a role, so may water resources, meaning frozen or unfrozen, because if the water in an area is all basically frozen animals will seek the open water. Here in the Midwest I think that may play a role during harsh winters. Rivers freeze as do all the lakes, maybe they smash through a spot to drink, anything is possible. What I can note is that more of the winter sightings seem to be to the south of the summer sightings. I do not at all think there are many creatures in Northern Illinois, and if I were to venture to guess maybe 2 family groups on the eastern half, that would put their numbers somewhere between 6-8. If that number of creatures existed in this area and were forced to move about for obvious reasons, the number of sightings given the huge population sort of makes sense, given we had quite a few sightings of a lone cougar entering the area, and another was spotted after the first was killed. I will give Sasquatch a little more credit for staying hidden and only moving in low light, or complete darkness, which is when most or all sightings in this area have taken place. Many sightings seem to take place in the spring along the rivers which may indicate movement or an increase in activity, fall activity seems centered on the rivers as well so maybe they are moving up and down the river system looking for suitable conditions, not really migration but following game as they would with elevation change, but not leaving snow prints might be pretty high on their list as well, they must know the danger of doing that and avoid it whenever possible in areas where humans can detect them. I know of two very credible snow print finds listed on the BFRO website for this area, and possibly more that were not as well documented. So they do move around in the snow even in an area like this, but these prints were not in very exposed areas, and luck was needed for them to have been found.

 

Edited January 14, 2017 by Lake County Bigfooot

[Explorer]

On 1/13/2017 at 0:38 AM, gigantor said:

Plotting the average altitude of summer vs winter reports for WA in the SSR  is interesting...  (y axis is altitude in feet)

 

Gigantor, thanks for generating and sharing these interesting plots.

 

When I see the spread in elevations for summer (0 to 5,500 ft) and winter (0 to 3,500 ft), it is hard to draw conclusions unless we know that the land area where those reports are coming from is consistent. 

I know they are all from Washington State, but the range in elevations in WA State is huge per county (see attached map) and the BF reports come from a broad range of counties.

 

For example, BFRO reports from Kitsap County (max elevation of 1,761 ft) and Thurston County (max elevation of 2,922 ft) are not going to show that kind of broad distribution in elevation between summer and winter.  Likewise, there are some counties in Eastern WA that have a narrow elevation spread (from min to max).  For example, the lowest elevation in Spokane county is 1,538 ft (along the Spokane River) and the highest elevation if 5,883 ft.

 

Attached is a map put together by County Highpointers, showing the five WA counties with the highest standard deviation in elevation over their means.  Four of them go from coast to high Cascade peaks and one goes from coast to Olympic peninsula peaks.

 

Taking into account the different distributions of elevation among the WA counties, then it would be interesting to check if we see any difference in the average elevation from BF reports between summer and winter for the following 3 groupings:

 

1)      For those counties that have a narrow elevation distribution (with low elevations and close to coast).

 

2)      For those counties that have a narrow elevation distribution (with higher elevation and away from the coast).

 

3)      For those counties that have a broad elevation distribution (going from coast to high elevation mountains).

 

I think group 3 (which would include the Cascade and Olympic range counties) are the dominant group in the BFRO database and would probably show what you showed in the graphs.  However, you might be able to remove the noise from those other 2 groups.

[gigantor]

 

Thanks for the guidance Explorer!

 

I'm looking into doing just that...

[norseman]

Why is boundary county Idaho green on the map?

[Explorer]

2 hours ago, norseman said:

Why is boundary county Idaho green on the map?

 

 

Norseman, the county standard deviation map (shown above) is focusing on the spread of elevations within each county.

So if a county has a big delta between its lowest and highest points, then it will probably have a high standard deviation.

For Boundary county Idaho (whose highest peak is only 7,669 ft), there must be some low elevation points that gives it a high spread.

Attached is the Idaho elevation map, and it appears that Boundary County has some low elevation points.

 

The original source map (and other interesting maps) is located at the following link.

http://www.cohp.org/records/variance/high_five_variances_map.html

 

[norseman]

Gotcha.

 

Ive always known that as prominence.

[gigantor]

I'm talking SSR functionality below only:

 

Trying to produce plots as suggested in this thread by Explorer, I've realized the county selection filter in the SSR, as implemented is insufficient. We should be able to select stats for any number and combination of counties. Now the filter only allows the selection of one county, which is not even close to being good enough. This is relatively easy to fix and I'm the process of addressing the issue.

 

Thanks to all for providing feedback. It really helps to improve the SSR.

[BobbyO]

3 hours ago, gigantor said:

I'm talking SSR functionality below only:

 

Trying to produce plots as suggested in this thread by Explorer, I've realized the county selection filter in the SSR, as implemented is insufficient. We should be able to select stats for any number and combination of counties. Now the filter only allows the selection of one county, which is not even close to being good enough. This is relatively easy to fix and I'm the process of addressing the issue.

 

Thanks to all for providing feedback. It really helps to improve the SSR.

 

Wonderful news and this is the exact reason I split WA up in to the geographical zones as I knew the benefits of combining counties and can I just add G, cross state boundaries too IE Skamania (WA) and Multonamah (OR) would be hugely beneficial too.

 

Only issue I see with this is that there are counties with the same name throughout the US and in different states, that has to be taken in to consideration when you're doing the fix.

[Guest Cryptic Megafauna]

5 hours ago, BobbyO said:

 

Wonderful news and this is the exact reason I split WA up in to the geographical zones as I knew the benefits of combining counties and can I just add G, cross state boundaries too IE Skamania (WA) and Multonamah (OR) would be hugely beneficial too.

 

Only issue I see with this is that there are counties with the same name throughout the US and in different states, that has to be taken in to consideration when you're doing the fix.

When approaching spatial data don't assume you want to analyse all of it, all the time and so have massive data sets (and massive data crunching.

Design your project first.

For instance if Bigfoot only lives mostly in the PNW at higher elevations then doing the whole US you just incorporated a lot of bad sightings and bad elevations and generalized where no generalization was appropriate.

Best choose a small area of special interest where you are fairly sure you have good data.

You will save yourself months of effort and get a better result.

 

If what you are suggesting is design a better database, once again it can get hammered by overly large queries.

 

In very large databases they generally use the principle of tiles as the processing cost freeze up even mainframes if not broken down.

 

 

Edited January 15, 2017 by Cryptic Megafauna

[BobbyO]

With all due respect, I have spent five years on this specific project, spend day in day out designing projects for data analysis for my work in soccer and have learnt and forgotton more about the geography of the PNW in the last five years than most would know in a lifetime.

 

But thank you anyway.

[JustCurious]

I did some research on temperature differences and found that the temperature changes by 3-degrees Farenheit for every 1000 ft difference in elevation.  It also changes by 3-degrees for each parallel (latitude) which is about 300 miles.  So, being at sea level in the desert at 90 degrees going up a 5000 ft elevation would change the temperature to 75 degrees.

 

So, when you're talking mountain ranges with peaks in the 12-14,000 ft range, the temperature variation rises to 36-42 degrees F between sea level and the peak.  Since we're basically assuming that Sasquatch doesn't come all the way down the mountain to sea level and not all mountains hit the 12-14,000 ft height, it would seem it can't be temperature that is driving movement. 

 

That drove me to dig into information sources.  I'm sharing the table I developed to use in my digging for whatever use anyone cares to derive from it.  There is much that stands out as not being an indicator of what 'draws' Sasquatch.  It isn't forest cover for example, despite what some theorize.  The one and only thing I found that correlates to states with the highest number of sightings is that those are the states where grapes are grown to any significant extent!  I don't think that by itself means anything because there aren't lot of sighting reports related to grapes.  But there might be something about climate and soil conditions required to grow grapes that does mean something.  I haven't dug into that yet.

 

The other thing I noticed is that where there are the highest number of sightings is also where the highest diversity of the most crops are found.

 

Sasquatch Sightings Analysis.xls

 

 

[hiflier]

This is heading toward a solution for what I was thinking as well with being able to cross state boundaries for county level research. Thanks everyone.

 

JustCurious, interesting. What I did with the file was sort column A for state instead of having the data sorted by BFRO#. The only reason that would matter would be to make it easier to find a certain state for reference as they would then be alphabetically listed..

Edited January 16, 2017 by hiflier

[BobbyO]

Good man JC, good info.

 

I've just been looking at the SSR and WA State and its near 600 reports now.

 

Interesting to note that for all four main geographical zones within the state (Eastern WA, South Cascades, North Cascades and Olympic Peninsula) that all differ in both terrain and topography, each zone see's winter with the lowest average elevation of any season for both all reports combined, and actual visual sighting reports.

 

Summer and Fall share highest average elevation in various geographical zones, but winter consistently remains the lowest average elevation in all eight data sets.