I believe that you are trying to use statistical methods that are appropriate for independent observations while you have correlated data, both temporarily and spatially. If you have observations say for 5 hours and decide to re-state this as 241 observations taken every minute, you really don't have 240 degrees of freedom in respect to the mean of these 241 values. Autocorrelation potentially yields an overstatement of the size of "N" and thusly creates false uncertainty statements. What you need to do is to find someone/some textbook/some web site/.... to teach you about time series data and it's analysis. One way to start is to GOOGLE "help me understand time series" and start to read/learn. There is a lot of material available on the web. One available trove of time series information is something I helped create at http://www.autobox.com/AFSUniversity/afsuFrameset.htm . I mention this as I am still associated with this firm and it's products thus my comments are "biased and opinionated" but not solely self-serving.
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