In steffilazerte/envirocan: Download Weather Data from Environment and Climate Change Canada

library(weathercan)
library(dplyr)
library(tibble)
knitr::opts_chunk$set(cache = FALSE,
                      fig.path = "tools/readme/")
old <- options(width = 160)

weathercan

This package makes it easier to search for and download multiple months/years of historical weather data from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) website.

Bear in mind that these downloads can be fairly large and performing multiple downloads may use up ECCC's bandwidth unnecessarily. Try to stick to what you need.

For more details and tutorials checkout the weathercan website (or see the development docs)

Check out the Demo weathercan shiny dashboard (html; source)

Installation

You can install weathercan from the rOpenSci r-Universe:

install.packages("weathercan", 
                 repos = c("https://ropensci.r-universe.dev", 
                           "https://cloud.r-project.org"))

View the available vignettes with vignette(package = "weathercan")

View a particular vignette with, for example, vignette("weathercan", package = "weathercan")

General usage

To download data, you first need to know the station_id associated with the station you're interested in.

Stations

weathercan includes the function stations() which returns a list of stations and their details (including station_id).

head(stations())
glimpse(stations())

You can look through this data frame directly, or you can use the stations_search function:

stations_search("Kamloops", interval = "hour")

Time frame must be one of "hour", "day", or "month".

You can also search by proximity:

stations_search(coords = c(50.667492, -120.329049), dist = 20, interval = "hour")

You can update this list of stations with

stations_dl()

And check when it was last updated with

stations_meta()

Note: For reproducibility, if you are using the stations list to gather your data, it can be a good idea to take note of the ECCC date of modification and include it in your reports/manuscripts.

Weather

Once you have your station_id(s) you can download weather data:

kam <- weather_dl(station_ids = 51423, start = "2018-02-01", end = "2018-04-15")
kam

You can also download data from multiple stations at once:

kam_pg <- weather_dl(station_ids = c(48248, 51423), start = "2018-02-01", end = "2018-04-15")

Climate Normals

To access climate normals, you first need to know the climate_id associated with the station you're interested in.

stations_search("Winnipeg", normals_years = "current")

Then you can download the climate normals with the normals_dl() function.

n <- normals_dl("5023222")

See the Getting Started vignette for more details.

Citation

citation("weathercan")

License

The data and the code in this repository are licensed under multiple licences. All code is licensed GPL-3. All weather data is licensed under the (Open Government License - Canada).

weathercan in the wild!

• Browse weathercan use cases on rOpenSci.org
• Checkout the weathercan Shiny App by Nick Rong (@nickyrong) and Nathan Smith (@WraySmith)
• R package RavenR has functions for converting ECCC data downloaded by weathercan to the .rvt format for Raven.
• R package meteoland has functions for converting ECCC data downloaded by weathercan to the format required for use in meteoland.

Similar packages

rclimateca

weathercan and rclimateca were developed at roughly the same time and as a result, both present up-to-date methods for accessing and downloading data from ECCC. The largest differences between the two packages are: a) weathercan includes functions for interpolating weather data and directly integrating it into other data sources. b) weathercan actively seeks to apply tidy data principles in R and integrates well with the tidyverse including using tibbles and nested listcols. c) rclimateca contains arguments for specifying short vs. long data formats. d) rclimateca has the option of formatting data in the MUData format using the mudata2 package by the same author.

CHCN

CHCN is an older package last updated in 2012. Unfortunately, ECCC updated their services within the last couple of years which caused a great many of the previous web scrapers to fail. CHCN relies on a decommissioned older web-scraper and so is currently broken.

Contributions

We welcome any and all contributions! To make the process as painless as possible for all involved, please see our guide to contributing

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

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steffilazerte/envirocan documentation built on Sept. 25, 2023, 10:16 p.m.