| This thesis creates new climate divisions to replace the current boundaries used by the National Climate Data Center for the state of Oregon. The current boundaries were created over a long time period, before many modern computer advances became available. The thesis contains two parts: First is a qualitative method (visual), and second is a quantitative method (cluster analysis). Although the visual method was generally more homogeneous than the original divisions, the results were not convincing and were possibly inappropriately influenced by using three temperature-related parameters. After removing the superfluous parameters of latitude and longitude, the cluster analysis produced promising results, but the clusters themselves were not geographically organized and were not conducive to the boundary-drawing phase of creating the new divisions. |
