vignettes/Climate.md

In camposfa/plhdbR: Tools for working with the Primate Life History Database

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Functions for working with the PLHDB data tables

Prepare workspace

  library(plhdbR)
  load_plhdb_packages()

Utility functions for climate data

plhdbR includes functions for pulling the most recent data for several large-scale climate oscillation indices from various online data repositories. Supported climate indices include:

• Dipole Mode index ("dmi")
• Multivariate ENSO Index ("mei")
• Oceanic Niño Index ("oni")
• Southern Oscillation Index ("soi")
• Pacific Decadal Oscillation ("pdo")
• Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation ("amo")
• North Atlantic Oscillation ("nao")

The function load_climate_index returns a named list of monthly climate index data. Each element of the list is an object of class dplyr::tbl_df.

  indices <- load_climate_index(c("nao", "mei"))
#> Reading MEI data from http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/table.html
#> Reading NAO data from http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/norm.nao.monthly.b5001.current.ascii.table

  indices
#> $mei
#> Source: local data frame [783 x 3]
#> 
#>       date_of  value index
#> 1  1950-01-01 -1.027   mei
#> 2  1950-02-01 -1.149   mei
#> 3  1950-03-01 -1.298   mei
#> 4  1950-04-01 -1.061   mei
#> 5  1950-05-01 -1.416   mei
#> 6  1950-06-01 -1.372   mei
#> 7  1950-07-01 -1.332   mei
#> 8  1950-08-01 -1.061   mei
#> 9  1950-09-01 -0.584   mei
#> 10 1950-10-01 -0.402   mei
#> ..        ...    ...   ...
#> 
#> $nao
#> Source: local data frame [783 x 3]
#> 
#>       date_of value index
#> 1  1950-01-16  0.92   nao
#> 2  1950-02-16  0.40   nao
#> 3  1950-03-16 -0.36   nao
#> 4  1950-04-16  0.73   nao
#> 5  1950-05-16 -0.59   nao
#> 6  1950-06-16 -0.06   nao
#> 7  1950-07-16 -1.26   nao
#> 8  1950-08-16 -0.05   nao
#> 9  1950-09-16  0.25   nao
#> 10 1950-10-16  0.85   nao
#> ..        ...   ...   ...

Squash all the list elements together to a single tbl_df with dplyr::bind_rows:

  indices_df <- dplyr::bind_rows(indices)
  summary(indices_df)
#>     date_of                        value              index          
#>  Min.   :1950-01-01 00:00:00   Min.   :-3.180000   Length:1566       
#>  1st Qu.:1966-04-19 18:00:00   1st Qu.:-0.676750   Class :character  
#>  Median :1982-08-08 12:00:00   Median : 0.010000   Mode  :character  
#>  Mean   :1982-08-08 17:43:54   Mean   : 0.006591                     
#>  3rd Qu.:1998-11-27 06:00:00   3rd Qu.: 0.683750                     
#>  Max.   :2015-03-16 00:00:00   Max.   : 3.040000

camposfa/plhdbR documentation built on May 13, 2019, 11:02 a.m.