openairmaps-package: openairmaps: Create Maps of Air Pollution Data

In openairmaps: Create Maps of Air Pollution Data

openairmaps: Create Maps of Air Pollution Data

Description

Combine the air quality data analysis methods of 'openair' with the JavaScript 'Leaflet' (https://leafletjs.com/) library. Functionality includes plotting site maps, "directional analysis" figures such as polar plots, and air mass trajectories.

Details

This is a companion package to openair, a UK NERC- and Defra-funded R package for the analysis of data pertaining to pollution monitoring and dispersion modelling.

As the R ecosystem has developed, R Markdown and, more recently, Quarto have emerged as capable tools for combining data analysis with document preparation. While these approaches can render typical .docx and .pdf outputs, one of their most common output formats is the HTML document. This format has many strengths, but a key one is interactivity; HTML widgets allow documents to be more informative and engaging. Numerous packages have been developed to easily develop these interactive widgets, such as plotly and dygraphs for plots, DT for tables, and leaflet for maps. The openairmaps package concerns itself with making leaflet maps.

Air quality data analysis — particularly as it pertains to long term monitoring data — naturally lends itself to being visualised spatially on a map. Monitoring networks are geographically distributed, and ignoring their geographical context may lead to incomplete insights at best and incorrect conclusions at worst! Furthermore, many air quality analysis tools are directional, asking questions of the data along the lines of “do elevated concentrations come from the North, South, East or West?” The natural question that follows is “well, what actually is it to the North/South/East/West that could be causing elevated concentrations?” — a map can help answer that question straightforwardly.

The openairmaps package contains functions to visualise UK air quality networks, and place "polar analysis" markers (like the openair polar plot) and airmass trajectory paths on maps. It uses a similar syntax to the openair package, which should make moving between the two relatively seamless.

Author(s)

Maintainer: Jack Davison [e-mail]

Authors:

• David Carslaw [e-mail]

See Also

The openair package, from which openairmaps is based.

The worldmet package, which simplifies the access of meteorological data in R.

The openair book for more in-depth documentation of openair and openairmaps.

openairmaps documentation built on June 22, 2024, 7:24 p.m.