rnoaa is an R interface to NOAA climate data.
Many functions in this package interact with the National Climatic Data
Center application programming interface (API) at
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/webservices/v2, all of
which functions start with ncdc_
. An access token, or API key, is
required to use all the ncdc_
functions. The key is required by NOAA,
not us. Go to the link given above to get an API key.
More NOAA data sources are being added through time. Data sources and their function prefixes are:
buoy_*
- NOAA Buoy data from the National Buoy Data Center
gefs_*
- GEFS forecast ensemble data
ghcnd_*
/meteo_*
- GHCND daily data from NOAA
isd_*
- ISD/ISH data from NOAA
homr_*
- Historical Observing Metadata Repository (HOMR)
vignette
ncdc_*
- NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) vignette
(examples)
seaice
- Sea ice vignette
storm_
- Storms (IBTrACS) vignette
swdi
- Severe Weather Data Inventory (SWDI) vignette
tornadoes
- From the NOAA Storm Prediction Center
argo_*
- Argo buoys
coops_search
- NOAA CO-OPS - tides and currents data
cpc_prcp
- rainfall data from the NOAA Climate
Prediction Center (CPC)
arc2
- rainfall data from Africa Rainfall Climatology
version 2
bsw
- Blended sea winds (BSW)
ersst
- NOAA Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface
Temperature (ERSST) data
lcd
- Local Climitalogical Data from NOAA
Government shutdowns can greatly affect data sources in this package. The following is a breakdown of the functions that fetch data by HTTP vs. FTP - done this way as we've noticed that during the ealry 2019 border wall shutdown most FTP services were up, while those that were down were HTTP; though not all HTTP services were down.
HTTP info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol
FTP info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol
HTTP services (whether service is/was up or down during early 2019 shutdown)
buoy_*
- Up
gefs_*
- Up
homr_*
- Up
ncdc_*
- Down
swdi
- Down
tornadoes
- Down
argo_*
- Up (all HTTP except two fxns, see also FTP below)
coops_search
- Up
ersst
- Down
lcd
- Down
se_*
- Down
FTP services (whether service is/was up or down during early 2019 shutdown)
ghcnd_*
- Up
isd_*
- Up
seaice
- Up
storm_
- Up
argo_*
- Up (only two fxns: argo()
and
argo_buoy_files()
)
cpc_prcp
- Up
arc2
- Up
bsw
- Up
We've tried to whenever possible detect whether a service is error due to a government shutdown and give a message saying so. If you know a service is down that rnoaa interacts with but we don't fail well during a shutdown let us know.
Functions to work with buoy data use netcdf files. You'll need the
ncdf4
package for those functions, and those only. ncdf4
is
in Suggests in this package, meaning you only need ncdf4
if you are
using the buoy functions. You'll get an informative error telling you to
install ncdf4
if you don't have it and you try to use the
buoy functions.
The meteo
family of functions are prefixed with meteo_
and
provide a set of helper functions to:
Identify candidate stations from a latitude/longitude pair
Retrieve complete data for one or more stations
(meteo_coverage()
)