A Statistical Examination of the Climatic Human Expert System:: The Sunset Garden Zones for California

A Statistical Examination of the Climatic Human Expert System:: The Sunset Garden Zones for California

Twentieth Century climatology was dominated by two great figures: Wladamir Köppen and C. Warren Thornthwaite. The first carefully developed climatic parameters to match the larger world vegetation communities. The second developed complex formulas of ?Moisture Factors? that provided efficient understanding of how evapotranspiration influences plant growth and health, both for native and non-native communities. In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, the Sunset Magazine Corporation develop a purely empirical set of Garden Zones, first for California. This thesis examines the digitized zones with reference to PRISM climate data. Variable coverages resembling those described by Sunset are extracted from the PRISM data. These variable coverages are collected for two buffered areas, one in northern California and one in southern California. This process is quite amenable for further examination of other regions of California