Application scenario

You work in a data science team that tries to model the road accidents in an area to improve the prediction for rescue services demand.

For your convenience, you are provided with the following data links, but you are encouraged to include other relevant data for your analyses.

The road accidents data set, attached to the assignment:

Dataset

The daily temperature and precipitation data for the region accessible through the NOAA data APIs.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/webservices/v2

Of particular relevance is the “Global Historical Climatology Network - Daily” data:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcn-daily-description

https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/readme.txt

Task 1: Source weather data

From Assignment 1, you have processed data for the road accidents of different types in a given region of Victoria. We still need to find local weather data from the same period. You are encouraged to find weather data online. Besides the NOAA data, you may also use data from the Bureau of Meteorology historical weather observations and statistics. (The NOAA Climate Data might be easier to process, also a full list of weather stations is provided here: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/ghcnd-stations.txt )

Answer the following questions:

Which data source do you plan to use? Justify your decision.

From the data source identified, download daily temperature and precipitation data for the region during the relevant time period. (Hint: If you download data from NOAA https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/, you need to request an NOAA web service token for accessing the data.)

Answer the following questions:

How many rows are in the data?

What time period does the data cover?