trendLevel: Plot heat maps of atmospheric composition data

In openair: Tools for the Analysis of Air Pollution Data

Plot heat maps of atmospheric composition data

Description

The trendLevel() function provides a way of rapidly showing a large amount of data in a condensed form. In one plot, the variation in the concentration of one pollutant can to shown as a function of between two and four categorical properties. The default arguments plot hour of day on the x-axis and month of year on the y-axis. However, x, y and type and summarising statistics can all be modified to provide a range of other similar plots, all being passed to cutData() for discretisation. The average wind speed and direction in each bin can also be plotted using the windflow argument.

Usage

trendLevel(
  mydata,
  pollutant = "nox",
  x = "month",
  y = "hour",
  type = "default",
  rotate.axis = c(90, 0),
  n.levels = c(10, 10, 4),
  windflow = NULL,
  limits = NULL,
  min.bin = 1,
  cols = "default",
  auto.text = TRUE,
  key.title = paste("use.stat.name", pollutant, sep = " "),
  key.position = "right",
  strip.position = "top",
  labels = NULL,
  breaks = NULL,
  statistic = c("mean", "max", "min", "median", "frequency", "sum", "sd", "percentile"),
  percentile = 95,
  stat.args = NULL,
  stat.safe.mode = TRUE,
  drop.unused.types = TRUE,
  col.na = "white",
  plot = TRUE,
  key = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

mydata	The openair data frame to use to generate the trendLevel() plot.
pollutant	The name of the data series in mydata to sample to produce the trendLevel() plot.
x, y, type	The name of the data series to use as the trendLevel() x-axis, y-axis or conditioning variable, passed to cutData(). These are used before applying statistic. trendLevel() does not allow duplication in x, y and type options.
rotate.axis	The rotation to be applied to trendLevel x and y axes. The default, c(90, 0), rotates the x axis by 90 degrees but does not rotate the y axis. If only one value is supplied, this is applied to both axes; if more than two values are supplied, only the first two are used.
n.levels	The number of levels to split x, y and type data into if numeric. The default, c(10, 10, 4), cuts numeric x and y data into ten levels and numeric type data into four levels. This option is ignored for date conditioning and factors. If less than three values are supplied, three values are determined by recursion; if more than three values are supplied, only the first three are used.
windflow	If TRUE, the vector-averaged wind speed and direction will be plotted using arrows. Alternatively, can be a list of arguments to control the appearance of the arrows (colour, linewidth, alpha value, etc.). See windflowOpts() for details.
limits	The colour scale range to use when generating the trendLevel() plot.
min.bin	The minimum number of records required in a bin to show a value. Bins with fewer than min.bin records are set to NA. The default is 1, i.e., all bins with no records are set to NA. Setting min.bin to a value greater than 1 can be useful to exclude bins with very few records that might produce unreliable statistic values.
cols	Colours to use for plotting. Can be a pre-set palette (e.g., "turbo", "viridis", "tol", "Dark2", etc.) or a user-defined vector of R colours (e.g., c("yellow", "green", "blue", "black") - see colours() for a full list) or hex-codes (e.g., c("#30123B", "#9CF649", "#7A0403")). See openColours() for more details.
auto.text	Either TRUE (default) or FALSE. If TRUE titles and axis labels will automatically try and format pollutant names and units properly, e.g., by subscripting the "2" in "NO2". Passed to quickText().
key.title	Used to set the title of the legend. The legend title is passed to quickText() if auto.text = TRUE.
key.position	Location where the legend is to be placed. Allowed arguments include "top", "right", "bottom", "left" and "none", the last of which removes the legend entirely.
strip.position	Location where the facet 'strips' are located when using type. When one type is provided, can be one of "left", "right", "bottom" or "top". When two types are provided, this argument defines whether the strips are "switched" and can take either "x", "y", or "both". For example, "x" will switch the 'top' strip locations to the bottom of the plot.
breaks, labels	If a categorical colour scale is required then breaks should be specified. These should be provided as a numeric vector, e.g., breaks = c(0, 50, 100, 1000). Users should set the maximum value of breaks to exceed the maximum data value to ensure it is within the maximum final range, e.g., 100–1000 in this case. Labels will automatically be generated, but can be customised by passing a character vector to labels, e.g., labels = c("good", "bad", "very bad"). In this example, 0 - 50 will be "good" and so on. Note there is one less label than break.
statistic	The statistic to apply when aggregating the data; default is the mean. Can be one of "mean", "max", "min", "median", "frequency", "sum", "sd", "percentile". Note that "sd" is the standard deviation, "frequency" is the number (frequency) of valid records in the period and "data.cap" is the percentage data capture. "percentile" is the percentile level (%) between 0-100, which can be set using the "percentile" option. Functions can also be sent directly via statistic; see 'Details' for more information.
percentile	The percentile level used when statistic = "percentile". The default is 95%.
stat.args	Additional options to be used with statistic if this is a function. The extra options should be supplied as a list of named parameters; see 'Details' for more information.
stat.safe.mode	An addition protection applied when using functions directly with statistic that most users can ignore. This option returns NA instead of running statistic on binned sub samples that are empty. Many common functions terminate with an error message when applied to an empty dataset. So, this option provides a mechanism to work with such functions. For a very few cases, e.g., for a function that counted missing entries, it might need to be set to FALSE; see 'Details' for more information.
drop.unused.types	Hide unused/empty type conditioning cases. Some conditioning options may generate empty cases for some data sets, e.g. a hour of the day when no measurements were taken. Empty x and y cases generate 'holes' in individual plots. However, empty type cases would produce blank panels if plotted. Therefore, the default, TRUE, excludes these empty panels from the plot. The alternative FALSE plots all type panels.
col.na	Colour to be used to show missing data.
plot	When openair plots are created they are automatically printed to the active graphics device. plot = FALSE deactivates this behaviour. This may be useful when the plot data is of more interest, or the plot is required to appear later (e.g., later in a Quarto document, or to be saved to a file).
key	Deprecated; please use key.position. If FALSE, sets key.position to "none".
...	Addition options are passed on to cutData() for type handling. Some additional arguments are also available: xlab, ylab and main override the x-axis label, y-axis label, and plot title. layout sets the layout of facets - e.g., layout(2, 5) will have 2 columns and 5 rows. fontsize overrides the overall font size of the plot. border sets the border colour of each tile.

Details

trendLevel() allows the use of third party summarising functions via the statistic option. Any additional function arguments not included within a function called using statistic should be supplied as a list of named parameters and sent using stat.args. For example, the encoded option statistic = "mean" is equivalent to ⁠statistic = mean, stat.args = list(na.rm = TRUE)⁠ or the R command mean(x, na.rm = TRUE). Many R functions and user's own code could be applied in a similar fashion, subject to the following restrictions: the first argument sent to the function must be the data series to be analysed; the name 'x' cannot be used for any of the extra options supplied in stat.args; and the function should return the required answer as a numeric or NA. Note: If the supplied function returns more than one answer, currently only the first of these is retained and used by trendLevel(). All other returned information will be ignored without warning. If the function terminates with an error when it is sent an empty data series, the option stat.safe.mode should not be set to FALSE or trendLevel() may fail. Note: The stat.safe.mode = TRUE option returns an NA without warning for empty data series.

Value

an openair object.

Author(s)

Karl Ropkins

David Carslaw

Jack Davison

Examples

# basic use
# default statistic = "mean"
trendLevel(mydata, pollutant = "nox")

# applying same as 'own' statistic
my.mean <- function(x) mean(x, na.rm = TRUE)
trendLevel(mydata, pollutant = "nox", statistic = my.mean)

# alternative for 'third party' statistic
# trendLevel(mydata, pollutant = "nox", statistic = mean,
#           stat.args = list(na.rm = TRUE))

## Not run: 
# example with categorical scale
trendLevel(mydata,
  pollutant = "no2",
  border = "white", statistic = "max",
  breaks = c(0, 50, 100, 500),
  labels = c("low", "medium", "high"),
  cols = c("forestgreen", "yellow", "red")
)

## End(Not run)

openair documentation built on April 2, 2026, 9:07 a.m.