countyweather (version 0.1.0)

hourly_df: Return average hourly weather data for a particular county.

Description

Returns a dataframe of average daily weather values for a particular county, year, weather variables, and/or specified coverage.

Usage

hourly_df(fips, year, var = "all", average_data = TRUE, coverage = NULL)

Arguments

fips

A character string of the five-digit U.S. FIPS code of a U.S. county.

year

A four-digit number or vector of numbers indicating the year or years for which you want to pull hourly data. Values for year can be in the range from 1901 to the current year.

var

A character vector specifying desired weather variables. For example, var = c("wind_speed", "temperature") pulls data on hourly wind speed and temperature. The core weather variables available include "wind_direction", "wind_speed", "ceiling_height", "visibility_distance", "temperature", "temperature_dewpoint", "air_pressure". Alternatively, you can specify var = "all" to include additional flag and quality codes.

average_data

TRUE / FALSE to indicate if you want the function to average daily weather data across multiple monitors.

coverage

A numeric value in the range of 0 to 1 that specifies the desired percentage coverage for the weather variable (i.e., what percent of each weather variable must be non-missing to include data from a monitor when calculating daily values averaged across monitors).

Value

A list with five elements. The first element, hourly_data, is a dataframe of hourly weather data averaged across multiple stations, as well as columns ("var"_reporting) for each weather variable showing the number of stations contributing to the average for that variable for each hour. station_df is a dataframe of station metadata for each station contributing weather data. A weather station will have one row per weather variable to which it contributes data. In addition to information such as USAF and WBAN ids and station names, this dataframe includes statistical information about weather values contributed by each station for each weather variable. These statistics include calculated coverage (calc_coverage), which is the percent of non-missing values for each station and variable for the specified date range, standard_dev (standard deviation), max, min, and range values for each station-weather variable combination. The element radius is the calculated radius within which stations were pulled from the county's center. Elements lat_center and lon_center are the latitude and longitude of the county's geographic center.

Details

This function serves as a wrapper to several functions from the rnoaa package, which provides weather data from all relevant stations in a county. This function filters and averages across NOAA ISD/ISH stations based on user-specified coverage specifications.

References

For more information on this dataset and available weather and flag/quality variables, see ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa/ish-format-document.pdf.

Examples

## Not run: 
# df <- hourly_df(fips = "12086", year = 1992,
#                 var = c("wind_speed", "temperature"))
# head(df$hourly_data)
# head(df$station_df)
# df$radius
# ## End(Not run)