noaastnr

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects and provides access to weather data from land-based weather stations within the US and around the world (Land-Based Station Data). One method for accessing these data is through a publically accessible FTP site. This package allows users to easily download data from a given station for a given year, extract several key weather parameters from the raw data files, and visualize the variation in these parameters over time. The weather parameters that are extracted with this package are:

• Air Temperature (degrees Celsius)
• Atmospheric Pressure (hectopascals)
• Wind Speed (m/s)
• Wind Direction (angular degrees)

Installation

You can install the development version of this package from Github with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("UBC-MDS/noaastnr")

Features

• get_stations_info:
  • This function downloads and cleans the data of all stations available at ftp://ftp.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa/
• get_weather_data:
  • This function loads and cleans weather data for a given NOAA station ID and year. It returns a dataframe containing a time series of air temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction.
• plot_weather_data:
  • This function visualizes the weather station observations including air temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction changing over time.

USAGE

A more detailed information about the usage of the features can be found at DOCUMENTATION

Dependancies

The list of the dependencies for this package can be viewed under Imports: at DESCRIPTION

Related Packages

The package rnoaa provides extensive functionality for interfacing with the NOAA’s data systems including their APIs and FTP service. The noaastnr package is a lightweight alternative to the rnoaa package which provides access to a specific subset of NOAA data, namely, their Integrated Surface Database (historical global hourly weather data) through their FTP service.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the noaastnr project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Contributors

We welcome and recognize all contributions. You can see a list of current contributors in the contributors tab.