These were early attempts to calculate and compare my underwater air consumption rates from Fall 2009 to Summer 2010. I compared them by general region (New England, Moorea, Friday Harbor) and by water temperature (Cold: ≤18ºC, Warm: ≥27ºC). Outliers are circled and I traced them back to the actual logged dives, where they were generally associated with strong current or 'buddy issues'.
Of course, after I did this I found that people generally standardise air consumption for depth to give a 'surface air consumption (SAC) rate.' So I recalculated and replotted and here's my final air consumption graphed by region, complete with quartiles. You can see that it's a distribution with a long upper tail.
My dive log is a ridiculously tempting source of things to graph because I log all my dive information
anyway. I'm sure some of the fancypants dive computers and software can do some of this for you, but I bet they don't have fun doing it and they they can't give you r-squares and regression coefficients!! (Not that those can tell you that much for dive data anyway)
I also looked at dive time by dive type. Here is a graph of scientific vs. recreational dive times. I have 170 scientific dives and 54 recreational dives logged, so I plotted frequency rather than absolute counts to get a better comparison of the distributions. They are quite different! It seems that my longest and shortest dives have been research dives, and the scientific dive distribution is much more spread out than the recreational dive distribution. Interestingly enough, they have similar medians that fall in the 40-50 min bin.
