Obtaining Historical Weather Data from Qld Government DES Website
In cropgrowdays: Crop Growing Degree Days and Agrometeorological Calculations

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
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Obtaining Australian SILO Meteorological Data for One Site

You can use the get_silodata function to retrieve SILO weather data from the Queensland Government DES longpaddock website https://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au.

The SILO (Scientific Information for Land Owners) is a database of Australian climate data hosted by the Science and Technology Division of the Queensland Government's Department of Environment and Science. These datasets are constructed from Australian Bureau of Meteorology observations and provide national coverage with interpolated infills for missing data. Weather station data is the observed data while the gridded data is interpolated. Typically, for most variables, weather data can be obtained for the period 1 January 1889 to yesterday. Please see https://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/silo/about/overview/ for a more in-depth description.

SILO products are provided free of charge to the public for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. However, please note that this is a free service and so a fair-use limit is imposed even if exact limits are not specified.

Finally, please note that by default, the APSIM format is returned and a date column called date_met is appended to the retrieved data. Many other formats are available and may need to be processed differently.

Obtaining SILO Data for Multiple Sites

Use the get_multi_silodata function to get SILO data for multiple sites. This is a simple wrapper to get_silodata. The main differences are that latitude and longitude are numerical vectors and the new parameter Sitenameis a character vector of site names or site labels.

A simple example is:

two_sites  <- get_multi_silodata(latitude = c(-27.00, -28.00),
                     longitude = c(151.00, 152.00),
                     Sitename = c("Site_1", "Site_2"),
                     START = "20201101", FINISH = "20201105",
                     email = "MY_EMAIL_ADDRESS")

The retrieved data are:

two_sites

Note that, to obtain gridded data, you need to supply at least each site's latitude and longitude as well as your email address by replacing MY_EMAIL_ADDRESS with your email address. The data is freely available under the Creative Commons 4.0 License.

Other Australian weather data

The excellent R package bomrang [@sparks2017; @sparks2021], which used to provide forecast, bulletin and historic data (see https://github.com/ropensci-archive/bomrang/), was archived after the Australian Bureau of Meteorology appeared to ban scraping on it's websites in March 2021. Adam Sparks and team are currently developing an R package weatherOz which also includes a SILO wrapper (see https://dpird-fsi.github.io/weatherOz/reference/get_silo.html). Paid services for some forecast, current and historical weather data for areas of interest may be available but these are not discussed here.