Data less than a week old: Storms can linger in an area for many hours causing slowly degrading conditions. A student intern at a weather company is asked to make a short-range prediction of snowfall...

Data less than a week old: Storms can linger in an area for many hours causing slowly degrading conditions. A student intern at a weather company is asked to make a short-range prediction of snowfall and its anticipated accumulation. The intern chooses to plot the snowwater ratio on the Y-axis and a mean air temperature measure called “thickness” on the X-axis for a large number of roads in his region over a period of the last 24 hours. He uses least squares regression analysis to create a best-fit line between the points and an equation upon which to predict future degradation. The analysis provides a very localized pattern of weather conditions for further modeling and enriches the intern’s experience with weather data.