In njtierney/bomr:

These are the steps I go through to get data from BOM

• I go to the website: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/?ref=ftr
• "select using text"
• Select Rainfall
• Select Daily Observations
• Select a weather station in the area of interest: "Brisbane"
• Choose the matching towns: "Brisbane, QLD, 27.47ºS, 153.03ºE"
• Choose Nearest Bureau stations: "040245 Toowong Bowls Club QLD (4.4km away)
• "Get data"
• select "All years of data"
• Open ZIP file
• read into R

knitr::opts_knit$set(root.dir = '..')

Then I read in the data, get a sense of what the data looks like

library(readr)

dat_toowong <- read_csv("IDCjAC0009_040245_1800_Data.csv")

dim(dat_toowong)

library(dplyr)

glimpse(dat_toowong)

Then collect the date information into a format that R understands

# combine year-month-day into date string

library(lubridate)

dat_clean <- 
  dat_toowong %>%
  mutate(date_time = paste(Year, Month, Day, sep = "-")) %>%
  mutate(date_time = ymd(date_time, tz = "Australia/Brisbane")) %>%
  rename(rainfall_in_mm = `Rainfall amount (millimetres)`)

then plot this in R

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(data = dat_clean,
       aes(x = date_time,
           y = rainfall_in_mm)) + 
  geom_line() + 
  labs(title = "rainfall over time in the Toowong Bowls Club region")

The good things are that the data from BOM is in a nice format, and required very little adjustment to get a nice plot.

However I think it would be nice to automate this from within R, so you could instead write something (roughly) like below:

library(bomr)

bomr_get_locations(location = "brisbane",
                   type = "rainfall",
                   frequency = "daily")

# list of locations around Brisbane.
# 

data <- 
bomr_get_data(long = "27.47S",
              lat = "153.03E",
              type = "rainfall",
              frequency = "daily",
              date_start = "01/01/2016",
              date_end = "01/29/2016")

It could also be possible to merge your own dataset with date and long/lat info with BOM data, for example:

new_data <-  bomr_merge_data(new_data = my_data,
                             type = "rainfall", 
                             frequency = "daily")

Which would avoid the user needing to do their own date matching on their own computer.

njtierney/bomr documentation built on May 23, 2019, 7:08 p.m.