HOB Tools Version History

Version 1.2.2 - Released on 14 March 2013

Fix: The buttons associated with the double mass plot no longer worked due to a change in the background code. This bug has been fixed.

Update: A new version of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network has been made available. This change required a revision to the "Extract USHCN Monthly Station Data" tool.

Update: A peer-reviewed manuscript about HOB Tools has been accepted for publication in Computers and Geosciences. This manuscript has been cited in the user's guide and added into the references section.

Fix: Depending on the computer's display settings, a few tools with large screen sizes had key textboxes and buttons cutoff. The user could not interact with them or run the tool. This issue has been fixed.

Significant Change: Some tools require column headers, so adequate information can be presented to the user. Unfortunately, this led to an inconsistency within HOB Tools. The typical way the "start row" works in HOB Tools has been changed, so it is associated with the column headers (see the user's guide for a visual example). This change does not impact the extraction tools, since they were developed such that downloaded data can be submitted to HOB Tools as is for processing.

Fix: Code that copied graphical data to the Windows clipboard as an enhanced metafile has been rewritten to correct occasional issues with the copy process. These issues were particularly noticable using newer editions of Adobe Illustrator (i.e., CS4 and higher).

Update: The National Climatic Data Center has released a new version of the monthly GHCN temperature data. Monthly GHCN temperature data now require a different extraction method. The Extract GHCN Monthly Station Data tool has been updated so monthly temperature data from version 3 of the GHCN can be extracted correctly. Monthly precipitation data remain available from version 2, and the extraction routine for those data has not changed.

Update: The missing data flag for modern hourly temperature data used in the Screen Interhourly Temperature Ranges, Adjust Station Segments, and Compute Daily Mean Temperatures tools has been changed from 999.9 to -99. This change is to improve consistency throughout the program.

Update: The Cumulated Series Analysis tool has been simplified to where it only performs double mass analysis and has been renamed the Double Mass Analysis tool. Cumulating difference series and proportion series often led to wild results that were meaningless.

Removal: The Extract CDO Daily Station Data tool has been removed. The National Climatic Data Center has integrated the Climate Data Online (CDO) system with the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). This has eliminated the need for a separate extraction routine to handle daily data downloaded from the CDO system, since the Extract GHCN Daily Station Data tool can be used.

Update: All figures in the user's guide have been updated and help topics associated with the extraction tools have been clarified to mention that they can be submitted to HOB Tools as is for processing.

Fix: Clarified the Cumulated Series Analysis help file. The Cumulated Series Analysis tool uses an alpha value of 0.05 to compute the prediction interval.

New: Added a new dataset tool that can extract the derived variables from the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (Extract IGRA Data).

New: Added a new default for the tolerance level in the Cumulative Series Analysis tool. The tool will now use the prediction interval to define the tolerance level, which takes into account the variability between the two series being examined. Users can still specify a specific value for the tolerance level, but this is highly subjective and the result can be very sensitive to the value entered. Therefore, it should be used with extreme care only.

Significant Change: The method used for return time analysis previously assummed a normal distribution. This has been changed to use a ranking system that is more standard (nonparametric statistics).

Fix: The years to compute the probability was not set when the Return Time Analysis tool was first loaded. This bug has been corrected.

Fix: Corrected a bug in the Extract GHCN Monthly Data tool where the station number was not properly set.

Update: Removed Visual Basic Power Pack dependency (VbPowerPack.dll no longer needed and will not be installed), and made other minor updates to the code to increase program efficiency.