Statistics coursework

I have been given secondary data for my investigations, this has made my data collection easier and allows me to use a larger set of data to get more of an accurate result. However, this might mean the data has not been set out the way i’d like it to be set out and may also represent irrelevant data, that could have been avoided if I had collected the data myself. The fact the data is secondary also makes me question the accuracy of the data seen as though I wasn't involved in the data collection. A third party have collected the data therefore, this data may not be reliable (out of date) and may contain anomalies and outliers, I will pick out these anomalies and outliers then remove them from the data and pick the next best value. The secondary data may also be biased because the researchers may have gathered data to show a particular outcome, so in order to avoid this i will have to choose the appropriate sampling method. I have been given continuous data about Heathrow ( London’s airport) and Ringway ( Manchester’s airport). The data contains information on the maximum temperature, minimum temperature , days of frost in the air, precipitation levels and sun hours and the month and year of which they occurred. The aim of my investigation is to prove that London has a stronger correlation between sunlight hours and temperature opposed to Manchester and to prove that London is warmer than Manchester. The information to help prove or disprove my aim’s will be the maximum temperatures, sunlight hours and the year and month of which they occurred on ( I will be more interested in the summer months opposed to the winter months), choosing these particular aim’s allow me to produce a more detailed analysis whereas if I would have chosen to investigate whether the colder it is the more precipitation there will be I would be limited on what I could analyse and research. My hypothesis’ will be listed below.

Hypothesis 1-

My hypothesis is London is warmer than Manchester and London’s temperatures are more consistent whereas Manchester’s have a larger spread.Manchester is closer to the coast meaning the cold winds blown in from the sea continue on to Manchester rather than London. Another point is London is densely populated meaning everyones body heat warms up the land opposed to Manchester. Also, Manchester is closer to the North pole meaning the cold breezes are also blown towards Manchester making the environment even colder than it already is. Not to forget, the clouds laden with rain come in from the Atlantic and hit the Pennine Hills and proceed to release the excess load on Manchester, meaning the cold water from the Atlantic falls onto the land cooling the land even more. An obvious point to mention would be the fact that London is further south meaning it is closer to the equator therefore meaning it is automatically warmer than Manchester. I also think London’s temperature will be more consistent than Manchester's because its closer to the equator which means it’s more or less a similar warm temperature, meaning one day it will not be scorching hot and the next ice cold but, meaning the temperature’s will have a smaller difference. We will be using summer months because we want to see how warm a city is so it would be pointless using the winter months.

In order to prove or disprove my hypothesis I will be using box plots to compare the temperatures of Heathrow and Ringway. I am using box plots because I can have both box plots on the same scale and it would make it clearer to compare and analyse the differences. I think the box plot for Heathrow will be further up the scale in comparison to the Ringway plot and Heathrow’s plot will have less outliers because the temperatures for London should be more consistent. I will be using standard deviation as my mathematical calculation seen as though it will tell me how spread out the data is which, unlike the mean it uses all the values in the data set to