article.md

In GiulioGenova/MeteoBrowser: A Shiny App to download the meteorological time series from the Open Data - Province of Bozen

title: 'Meteo Browser South Tyrol: A Shiny App to download the meteorological time series from the Open Data Catalogue of the Province of Bolzano/Bozen - Italy' tags: - Open Data - R - Shiny authors: - name: Giulio Genova orcid: 0000-0001-9412-8651 affiliation: 1 - name: Mattia Rossi orcid: 0000-0003-4760-1607 affiliation: 2 - name: Georg Niedrist orcid: 0000-0002-7511-6273 affiliation: 1 - name: Stefano Della Chiesa orcid: 0000-0002-6693-2199 affiliation: 1 affiliations: - name: eurac research, Institute for Alpine Environment, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. index: 1 - name: eurac research, Institute for Earth Observation, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. index: 2 date: 14 March 2019 bibliography: article.bib

Summary

Promoting open data framework with a comprehensive data infrastructure increases publicly available knowledge and provides new unexplored benefits [@Janssen2012]. Moreover, combining meteorological and hydrological open data with other datasets can have a positive impact in environmental application [@Zuiderwijk2014].

The Open Data catalogue of South Tyrol (http://daten.buergernetz.bz.it/de/) is a bilingual (Italian and German) public database with a large variety of local data and aims to facilitate data search and data re-usability. The Meteo section of the Open Data catalogue contains several meteorological and hydrological variables coming from 120 real-time monitoring stations. Precisely, measurements of air temperature, air humidity, precipitation, wind speed, wind direction, solar radiation, hours of sunlight, river discharge, water level, ground water level. The dataset available refers to the last three years.

Meteo Browser South Tyrol is a web application based on the statistical programming language R [@Team2018] and the package Shiny [@Chang2015], which provides the framework for building responsive web based applications using javascript. Its purpose is to access and retrieve meteorological and hydrological time series from the South Tyrolean Meteo Open Data API (further documentation http://daten.buergernetz.bz.it/de/dataset/misure-meteo-e-idrografiche).

The tool creates multiple queries that filter and resample the available data based on the user's need. Users can interact with leaflet graphical representation of all stations, calculate distances and draw polygons to select the target stations. They can also filter by station, date range, altitude and type of measurement. Data time series can be exported as comma separated values (.csv) or JSON and the format is compliant to tidy data frames [@Wickham2014], both long and wide tables can be downloaded. The app is available in English, German and Italian.

Meteo Browser South Tyrol is a user-friendly web tool beneficial for a wide range of users, from common citizens to students as well as researchers, private companies and public administration.

Thus, the Meteo Browser South Tyrol allows to freely and easily access hydrological and meteorological data, promoting dissemination for a wide range of users, from common citizens to students as well as researchers, private companies and the public administration. Overall this promotes the development of services in several fields such as, education, hydrology and agriculture [@carolan2015can].

Finally, the developed web application provides a fast and comprehensible solution to access, visualize and download openly available databases exposed to a JSON-based API. This can be further developed and possibly expanded to other networks based on similar APIs and Open Data standardization.

The application is at the following link:

http://meteobrowser.eurac.edu/

The repository is at the following link:

https://github.com/GiulioGenova/MeteoBrowser

References

GiulioGenova/MeteoBrowser documentation built on Nov. 5, 2019, 6:07 p.m.