library(clifro)
The National Climate Database holds climate data from around 6,500 climate stations around New Zealand including some offshore and Pacific Islands. Over 600 stations are currently active and are still receiving valuable climate data. CliFlo is a web interface to the database managed by NIWA, allowing users to submit queries and retrieve ten-minute, hourly, daily or summary data. The use of CliFlo is free given that the user has subscribed and accepted NIWA's terms and conditions.
The clifro
package is designed to make CliFlo queries much simpler and
provide extensions that are currently not offered by CliFlo. The intention is
to simplify the data extraction, manipulation, exploration and visualisation
processes and easily create publication-worthy graphics for some of the primary
datatypes, especially for users with limited or non-existent previous R
experience. Experienced useRs will also find this package helpful for maximising
efficiency of climate data integration with R for further analysis, modelling or
export.
This vignette provides an introduction to the clifro
package demonstrating the
primary functionality by way of example. For more information on any of the
functions in the clifro
package the user is referred to the help index for
the clifro
package, help(package = "clifro")
.
As stated above, if the intention is to extract data from any station other than
Reefton Ews (subscription-free) and to maximise the potential of clifro
, a
valid subscription is
needed.
The cf_user
function is all that is required to create a valid clifro
user,
me = cf_user("username", "password")
where username
and password
is substituted for the user's CliFlo
credentials.
Once the user has been authenticated, the next step is to choose the datatypes of interest, see the choose datatypes vignette for details on choosing datatypes. For this example we are interested in daily MSL atmospheric pressure, minimum and maximum temperature extremes (deg C), daily rainfall (mm) and daily surface wind. (m/s).
my.dts = cf_datatype(select_1 = c(7, 4, 3, 2), select_2 = c(1, 2, 1, 1), check_box = list(3, 1, 1, 4), combo_box = c(NA, NA, NA, 1)) my.dts
## dt.name dt.type dt.options dt.combo ## dt1 Pressure Pressure [9amMSL] ## dt2 Temperature and Humidity Max_min_temp [DailyMaxMin] ## dt3 Precipitation Rain (fixed periods) [Daily ] ## dt4 Wind Surface wind [9amWind] m/s
The third requisite for a valid clifro
query is the station where the
data has been collected. If the agent numbers of the required CliFlo stations
are known, the only function needed to create a clifro station cfStation
object is cf_station
. See the choose station vignette
for help with choosing stations when the agent numbers are unknown, and the
working with clifro stations vignette for further information
and methods on cfStation
objects.
For this example we are interested in assessing how these datatypes differ in various parts of the country by taking a selection of stations from various regions. These include a station from Invercargill (5814), Nelson (4241), Hamilton (2112) and Auckland (1962)
my.stations = cf_station(5814, 4241, 2112, 1962) my.stations[, 1:5]
## name network agent start end ## 1 Invercargill Aero I68433 5814 1939-09-01 2020-08-18 02:00:00 ## 2 Nelson Aero G13222 4241 1940-07-01 2020-08-18 02:00:00 ## 3 Auckland Aero C74082 1962 1962-05-01 2020-08-18 02:00:00 ## 4 Hamilton Aws C75834 2112 1989-11-30 2020-08-18 02:00:00
Now that we have a valid clifro
user and the datatypes and stations of
interest, a clifro
query can be conducted using the cf_query
function. We
are interested in all available data from 2012 to 2014.
cf.datalist = cf_query(user = me, datatype = my.dts, station = my.stations, start_date = "2012-01-01 00", end_date = "2014-01-01 00") cf.datalist
## List containing clifro data frames: ## data type start end rows ## df 1) Pressure 9am only (2012-01-01 9:00) (2013-01-01 9:00) 1468 ## df 2) Max_min Daily (2012-01-01 9:00) (2013-12-31 9:00) 2923 ## df 3) Rain Daily (2012-01-01 9:00) (2013-12-31 9:00) 2923 ## df 4) Surface Wind 9am only (2012-01-01 9:00) (2013-01-01 9:00) 1468
We can see that the pressure and surface wind data only span one year.
There is now a list of 4 dataframes in R containing all the available data for
each of the stations and datatypes chosen above. The plotting is simply done
with a call to plot
, the type of plot and plotting options depends on the
datatype. See ?'plot.cfDataList'
for details on default clifro
plotting. The following are examples of some of the plots possible with
clifro
, note how the optional ggtheme
argument changes the look of the plots.
This is the first dataframe in cf.datalist
. Since the first argument passed to
plot
is a list of different datatypes (cfDataList
), the second argument
(y
) tells the plot
method which of the four dataframes to plot.
We could therefore simply type plot(cf.datalist, y = 1)
and get a nice plot of
the MSL atmospheric pressure, but it is usually nice to modify the defaults
slightly. Since the plot method returns a ggplot
object, we can easily modify
the plots using ggplot2.
# Load the ggplot2 library for element_text() and geom_smooth() functions library(ggplot2) # Increase the text size to 16pt and add a loess smoother with a span equal to a # quarter of the window plot(cf.datalist, ggtheme = "bw", text = element_text(size = 16)) + geom_smooth(method = "loess", span = 1/4)
This is the second dataframe in cf.datalist
, therefore y = 2
.
These are temperature data showing the air temperature extremes at
each of the four stations, represented by a grey region in the plot. Note that
if the average temperature were available, these would be plotted too.
# Try a different ggtheme plot(cf.datalist, 2, ggtheme = "linedraw")
This is the third dataframe in cf.datalist
, therefore y = 3
. Currently there
are two possible default plots available for rainfall; with or without soil
deficit/runoff.
# Try yet another ggtheme plot(cf.datalist, 3, ggtheme = "light") # Or only plot the rainfall data # plot(cf.datalist, 3, ggtheme = "light", include_runoff = FALSE)
There are three types of plots available for wind data in clifro
. The default
is to plot a windrose displaying wind speed and directions of the full time
series at each station. The windrose
function in clifro
is also available
for the user to plot their own directional data - see ?windrose
. The other two
optional plots for wind data in clifro
are the wind speed and wind direction
plots. These plots display wind speed and direction patterns through time,
adding valuable temporal information that is not portrayed in the windroses.
The wind datatype is the fourth dataframe in cf.datalist
, therefore y = 4
.
# Defaults to windrose plot(cf.datalist, 4, n_col = 2)
The other two plotting methods for wind data are the speed_plot
and
direction_plot
functions to assess the temporal variability in wind (plots not
shown).
# Plot the wind speeds through time, choose the 'classic' ggtheme and # allow the y-axis scales to differ for each station speed_plot(cf.datalist, 4, ggtheme = "classic", scales = "free_y") # Plot wind direction contours through time direction_plot(cf.datalist, 4, n_col = 2)
# Export the data as separate CSV files to the current working directory for (i in seq_along(cf.datalist)) write.csv(cf.datalist[i], file = tempfile(paste0(cf.datalist[i]@dt_name, "_"), tmpdir = normalizePath("."), fileext = ".csv"), na = "", row.names = FALSE) # Each dataset is saved separately here: getwd()
The primary aim of this package is to make the substantial amount of climate
data residing within the National Climate Database more accessible and easier
to work with. The clifro
package has many advantages over using the CliFlo
web portal including conducting searches much more efficiently, examining the
spatial extent of the stations and enabling high quality plots to aid the data
exploration and analysis stage.
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