Introduction to the RivRetrieve R package"
In RivRetrieve: Retrieve Global River Gauge Data

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",warning=FALSE,message=FALSE,fig.width=7
)

Here is a quick tutorial for RivRetrieve functions:

The RivRetrieve package is developed to efficiently access and download global river gauge data into an R environment. While numerous river data exists, our package is currently limited to daily measurements of river stage (meters) and discharge (cubic meters per second) for: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Japan, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

library(RivRetrieve)
# Amazon River near Obidos, Brazil
## siteNumber='17050001'
## discharge=brazil(site=siteNumber,variable='discharge')
## stage=brazil(site=siteNumber,variable='stage')
## plot(discharge$Date,discharge$Q, type='l',xlab='',ylab='Discharge (cms)')

# Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, LA, USA
siteNumber="07374000"
discharge=usa(site=siteNumber,variable='discharge')
stage=usa(site=siteNumber,variable='stage')
plot(discharge$Date,discharge$Q, type='l',xlab='',ylab='Discharge (cms)')

RivRetrieve automatically outputs a dataframe containing a Date column of datetime values and either a H or Q numeric column for the stage and discharge variable, respectively.

Stage is provided in meters and discharge is provided in cubic meters per second.

Accessing the raw gauge data:

library(knitr)
## kable(raw[1:5,],caption='Raw Brazilian gauge data')

raw=original(discharge)
kable(raw[1:5,],caption='Raw US gauge data')

Site locations for all agencies can also be found:

## brazilSites=brazil(sites=TRUE)
## kable(brazilSites[1:10,],caption='Example Brazilian river gauge locations')

usaSites=usa(sites=TRUE)
kable(usaSites[1:10,],caption='Example US river gauge locations')

Date defined retrieval

Specific time periods can also be accessed if the entire time series is not needed.

# Annual timeseries
## siteNumber='17050001'
## recent=brazil(site=siteNumber,variable='stage',start_date = start,end_date = end)
## plot(recent$Date,recent$H,type='l', xlab='',ylab='Stage (m)')

siteNumber="07374000"
start='2009-01-01'
end='2010-01-31'
recent=usa(site=siteNumber,variable='stage',start_date = start,end_date = end)
plot(recent$Date,recent$H,type='l', xlab='',ylab='Stage (m)')