sunTime: Convert clock times to sun times

In overlap: Estimates of Coefficient of Overlapping for Animal Activity Patterns

Description

Converts a vector of clock times to "sun times", by mapping sunrise to π/2 and sunset to 3π/2. Sunrise and sunset times are determined based on the dates and locations provided. See Nouvellet et al (2012) for a discussion. Requires the maptools package.

Usage

sunTime(clockTime, Dates, Coords)

Arguments

clockTime	a vector of times of observations in radians, ie. scaled to [0, 2π].
Dates	a POSIXct object with the dates of the observations; the time zone must be set to the time zone used for 'clockTime'.
Coords	a SpatialPoints object with the locations of the observations, or with a single point giving a approximate location for the study area; the coordinates must be geographical coordinates, eg, WGS84, with long before lat.

Value

Returns a vector of "sun times" in radians, where π/2 corresponds to sunrise and 3π/2 to sunset.

Author(s)

Mike Meredith.

References

Nouvellet et al (2012) Noisy clocks and silent sunrises: measurement methods of daily activity pattern. Journal of Zoology 286:179-184.

Examples

# Check that sp and maptools packages are installed
if(requireNamespace("sp") && requireNamespace("maptools")) {
  # Get example data:
  data(simCalls)
  str(simCalls)

  # Convert dates to a POSIXct object with the right time zone (GMT):
  Dates <- as.POSIXct(simCalls$dates, tz="GMT")

  # Create a SpatialPoints object with the location
  coords <- matrix(c(-3, 56), nrow=1)
  Coords <- sp::SpatialPoints(coords, proj4string=sp::CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84"))

  st <- sunTime(simCalls$time, Dates, Coords)

  par(mfrow=2:1)
  densityPlot(st, col='red', lwd=2, xaxt='n', main="Sun time")
  axis(1, at=c(0, 6, 12, 18, 24),
    labels=c("midnight", "sunrise", "noon", "sunset", "midnight"))
  densityPlot(simCalls$time, lwd=2, main="Clock time")
  par(mfrow=c(1,1))
}

Example output

Loading required namespace: sp
Loading required namespace: maptools
'data.frame':	100 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ time : num  2.38 4.07 1.17 2.26 1.86 ...
 $ dates: chr  "2017-01-05" "2017-01-09" "2017-01-13" "2017-01-14" ...

overlap documentation built on May 17, 2021, 9:09 a.m.