download.climateSummaries: Download a Cache a Met Climate Summary File

In clayton33/csasMarPhys: DFO Maritimes Physical Oceanography CSAS analysis

Download a Cache a Met Climate Summary File

Description

Data are downloaded from the Environment and Climate Change Canada's climate weather website and cached locally

Usage

download.climateSummaries(
  year,
  month,
  province,
  type,
  destdir = ".",
  destfile,
  force = TRUE
)

Arguments

year	A number giving the year of interest.
month	A number giving the month of interest.
province	A string giving the province abbreviation of interest.
type	A string indicating which type of file to download, either "xml" for an XML file or "csv" for a CSV file.
destdir	Optional string indicating the directory in which to store downloaded files. If not supplied, "." is used, i.e. the data file is stored in the present working directory.
destfile	Optional string indicating the name of the file. If not supplied, the file name is constructed from the other parameters of the function call, so subsequent calls with the same parameters will yield the same result, thus providing the key to the caching scheme.
force	Logical value indicating whether to force a download, even if the file already exists locally.

Details

The data are downloaded from http://climate.weather.gc.ca/prods_servs/cdn_climate_summary_report_e.html using utils::download.file() pointed to the Environment and Climate Change Canada website (reference 1) using queries that had to be devised by reverse-engineering, since the agency does not provide documentation about how to construct queries. Caution: the query format changes from time to time, so download.met.climateSummaries() may work one day, and fail the next.

Author(s)

Chantelle Layton

clayton33/csasMarPhys documentation built on June 8, 2025, 3:10 a.m.