R/zonalDaymet-package.r

In Conte-Ecology/zonalDaymet: A toolset to process Daymet climate records

#' zonalDaymet
#'
#' @name zonalDaymet
#' @docType package
#' 
#' @description
#' zonalDaymet provides tools to establish a relationship between Daymet 
#' climate records and user-defined spatial polygons within the R environment.
#'
#' @details
#' Daymet climate records are provided in a gridded format (1 km^2 resolution) as 
#' netCDF files. Each point location in the grid, specified by latitude/longitude 
#' coordinates, has one time series associated with each climate variable. Each 
#' netCDF file contains 1 variable record over 1 year for the entire North American 
#' range. The zonalDaymet package provides tools to accomplish the following:
#' \itemize{
#' \item Download netCDF climate mosaics from the Daymet THREDDS Server
#' \item Iterate through netCDF files combining time series records and variables 
#' into tables
#' \item Spatially average climate records within user-specified spatial polygons
#' \item Process spatial objects into manageable pieces within the R environment 
#' to avoid memory issues during spatial averaging
#' \item Return subsets from the climate mosaics given latitude/longitude 
#' coordinate bounds
#' }
#' Functionality is provided to return spatial averages as either a dataframe in 
#' the current R environment or write directly to a SQLite database. A function 
#' is provided to simplify record selection from the database. If a polygon is
#' too small to warrant a spatial average of points, the nearest point is assigned
#' to the polygon.

NULL