In leighseverson/rnoaa: 'NOAA' Weather Data from R

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  comment = "#>", 
  warning = FALSE, 
  message = FALSE,
  cache = TRUE
)

HOMR metadata

HOMR (Historical Observing Metadata Repository) provides climate station metadata. It's a NOAA service.

Find out more about HOMR at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/homr/ and the HOMR API at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/homr/api.

Load rnoaa

library('rnoaa')

Search by station identifier

You can do this in various ways. Using the qid parameter (stands or qualified ID, as far as I know), you can search by suffix (e.g., 046742), or both separated by a colon (e.g., COOP:046742).

By station suffix

res <- homr(qid = ':046742')
names(res)
names(res[['20002078']])
res$`20002078`[1:3]

By both

res <- homr(qid = 'COOP:046742')
names(res)
names(res[['20002078']])
res$`20002078`[1:5]

Search by station parameter

You can also search by station identifier, which is different from the qid above.

res <- homr(station=20002078)
names(res)
names(res[['20002078']])
res$`20002078`[4:6]

Search by state and county

By state

res <- homr(state='DE', begindate='2005-01-01', enddate='2005-02-01')
names(res)

By country

res <- homr(country='GHANA', begindate='2005-01-01', enddate='2005-02-01')
library("plyr")
ldply(res, function(x) x$location$latlon)

By state and county

res <- homr(state='NC', county='BUNCOMBE', headersOnly = TRUE)
head( ldply(res, "[[", "head") )

Get header information only

res <- homr(headersOnly=TRUE, state='DE')
head( ldply(res, "[[", "head") )

Data definitions

The data returned is the same format for all, so a separate function is provided to get metadata. The function homr_definitions() does query the HOMR API, so does get updated metadata - i.e., it's not a static dataset stored locally.