So, where did the weather stations go and does it matter?

In an attempt to determine if it actually matters what happened to the weather stations, I looked at the data for the last year (2015) and tried to match up the station locations over previous years. The stations in 2015 are largely in the previous year's stations. I plotted the ratio of available stations per year when compared to 2015.

What this means is that the weather stations in 2015 are largely available in previous years, which means that they can be used to make a real comparison. I would still love to know why so many stations were removed between 1990 and 2015.

I also found a free SVN site to post my scripts: https://subversion.assembla.com/svn/noaa This post can be recreated by checking out revision 5 and running "runme.m" via MATLAB or OCTAVE after getting the data via temperature.sh