In gavinsimpson/canadaHCD: Canadian Historical Climate Data

knitr::opts_chunk$set(collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>", cache = FALSE)
options(tibble.width = 120)

canadaHCD

Access Canadian Historical Climate Data from R. The Government of Canada's Historical Climate Data website provides access to hourly, daily, and monthly weather records for stations throughout Canada.

These are raw data that have undergone some quality control, but issues such as changes in station location are unmanged; the data for the original stationID stops at a certain point and a new stationID continues recording. For a more curated data set for climate change research at broad spatial and temporal scales see the Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data (AHCCD).

Installation

canadaHCD is still under active development towards a 0.1 release. In the meantime, if you wish to use the package, please install it from this github repo, which is most easily achieved using Hadley Wickham's remotes package:

## install.packages("devtools")
remotes::install_github("gavinsimpson/canadaHCD")

Usage

Say I'm interested in climate data for stations in Yellowknife, I can search for all known stationIDs with "Yellowknife" in their name using find_station()

library("canadaHCD")
find_station("Yellowknife")

To download the monthly HCD from YELLOWKNIFE HYDRO I can use hcd_monthly(), providing it with the StationID for that particular weather station

yh <- hcd_monthly(1707)

The data are returned as a tibble (a tbl_df), which shows a compact version of the data frame.

yh

You should be able to work with these objects mostly as if they were data frames.

Allthough not yet exposed through any functions in the package, you can access a snapshot of the station metadata via the canadaHCD:::station_data data frame.

canadaHCD:::station_data

If we wanted to know which resolutions of data were available for the YELLOWKNIFE HYDRO station, we can extract certain columns from the station data object

id <- grep("YELLOWKNIFE HYDRO", canadaHCD:::station_data$Name)
vars <- c("HourlyFirstYr", "HourlyLastYr", "DailyFirstYr", "DailyLastYr",
    "MonthlyFirstYr", "MonthlyLastYr")
canadaHCD:::station_data[id, vars]