import_ghcn_monthly: Import data from the Global Historical Climatology monthly...

In worldmet: Import Surface Meteorological Data from NOAA

Import data from the Global Historical Climatology monthly (GHCNm) database

Description

This function is a convenient way to access the monthly summaries of the GHCN. Monthly average temperature is available via import_ghcn_monthly_temp() and monthly precipitation via import_ghcn_monthly_prcp(). Note that these functions can take a few minutes to run, and parallelism is only enabled for precipitation data.

Usage

import_ghcn_monthly_temp(
  table = c("inventory", "data"),
  dataset = c("qcu", "qcf", "qfe")
)

import_ghcn_monthly_prcp(
  station = NULL,
  year = NULL,
  table = c("inventory", "data"),
  progress = rlang::is_interactive()
)

Arguments

table	Either "inventory", "data", or both. The tables to read and return in the output list.
dataset	For import_ghcn_monthly_temp(). One of the below options. More information is available at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v4/readme.txt. "qcu": Quality Control, Unadjusted "qcf": Quality Control, Adjusted, using the Pairwise Homogeneity Algorithm. "qfe": Quality Control, Adjusted, Estimated using the Pairwise Homogeneity Algorithm. Only the years 1961-2010 are provided. This is to help maximize station coverage when calculating normals.
station	For import_ghcn_monthly_prcp(). The specific stations to import monthly precipitation data for.
year	One or more years of interest. If NULL, the default, all years of data available for the chosen stations will be imported. Note that, in the GHCNd and GHCNm, files are split by station but not year, so setting a year will not speed up the download. Specifying fewer years will improve the speed of a GHCNh download, however.
progress	For import_ghcn_monthly_prcp(). Show a progress bar when importing many stations? Defaults to TRUE in interactive R sessions. Passed to .progress in purrr::map().

Value

a list of tibbles

Parallel Processing

If you are importing a lot of meteorological data, this can take a long while. This is because each combination of year and station requires downloading a separate data file from NOAA's online data directory, and the time each download takes can quickly add up. Many data import functions in {worldmet} can use parallel processing to speed downloading up, powered by the capable {mirai} package. If users have any {mirai} "daemons" set, these functions will download files in parallel. The greatest benefits will be seen if you spawn as many daemons as you have cores on your machine, although one fewer than the available cores is often a good rule of thumb. Your mileage may vary, however, and naturally spawning more daemons than station-year combinations will lead to diminishing returns.

# set workers - once per session
mirai::daemons(4)

# import lots of data - NB: no change in the import function!
big_met <- import_ghcn_hourly(code = "UKI0000EGLL", year = 2010:2025)

Author(s)

Jack Davison

See Also

Other GHCN functions: import_ghcn_countries(), import_ghcn_daily(), import_ghcn_hourly(), import_ghcn_inventory(), import_ghcn_stations()

worldmet documentation built on Feb. 2, 2026, 5:06 p.m.