NEWS.md

In timtrice/rrricanes: Web Scraper for Atlantic and East Pacific Hurricanes and Tropical Storms

rrricanes Unreleased (yyyy-mm-dd)

NEW FEATURES

• Add get_storm_list that returns a list of, it would appear, all known storms for many basins (beyond AL, EP)

• Currently only returns 2582 cyclones despite more storms present in the file. This is due to a currenty unknown issue in the raw CSV file.

• get_ftp_storm_data, given a stormid (key) and a product, will return a dataframe of the requested data if it exists for the current storm. This opens up cyclones earlier than 1998 however is not yet tested.

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• Add nm_to_sm to convert nautical miles to survey miles. (#99)

• Allow parameters for rgdal::readOGR (#104)

• Add tidy_adv to replace tidy_fstadv; tidy_fstadv will be removed in release 0.2.2 (#103)

• al_prblty_stations and cp_prblty_stations updated to accomodate new dataset. (#46)

• ep_prblty_stations now returns dataset of east Pacific stations. (#46)

BUG FIXES

• tidy_fcst only returned forecasts for hours 12:96. Now returns 120. (#107)
• gis_wsp now uses GET instead of POST to retrieve wind speed probability GIS datasets. (#108)

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• NA

rrricanes 0.2.0-6 (2017-07-16)

NEW FEATURES

• NA

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• get_storms and get_storm_data have been rewritten to utilize pkg crul's asynchronous features. This will not make much of a difference in get_storms (and may actually be slightly slower; to be explained). But the difference with get_storm_data should be very noticeable. There is a limit to hitting the NHC archives; 80 requests per 10 seconds. Both functions send 4 links through every 0.5 seconds to avoid this limit. Timeout issues should no longer occur so options rrricanes.http_attempts and rrricanes.http_timeout have been removed. The primary cause of long processing now is due to scraping, particularly with the fstadv products; the amount of data in these products and the unstructured nature of the products require a number of rules. This can probably be simplified in future releases. (#94)

BUG FIXES

• NA

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• load_storm_data has been removed in favor of loading rrricanesdata. See vignette "installing_rrricanesdata" for more information.

rrricanes 0.2.0-5 (2017-07-08)

NEW FEATURES

• NA

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• load_storm_data now takes readr::read_csv parameters.

BUG FIXES

• NA

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• NA

rrricanes 0.2.0-4 (2017-06-25)

NEW FEATURES

• NA

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• Key variable added to discus dataframes. Key will be NA for all cyclones >= 2005. Should not be <= 2006. (#80)
• Removed Adv variable from posest dataframes. Position estimates do not have advisory numbers. (#81)
• Removed Adv variable from update. Updates do not have advisory numbers. (#84)
• Added variable Key to get_public dataframes. (#85)
• Added variable Key to get_update dataframes. (#86)
• Removed non-existent wind radii variables in get_fstadv. Hrs 48 and 72 hours only have 34 and 50kt wind fields. Hrs 96 and 120 have none. (#89)

BUG FIXES

• NA

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• NA

rrricanes 0.2.0-3 (2017-06-22)

NEW FEATURES

• NA

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• Examples for functions knots_to_mph, mb_to_in, status_abbr_to_str, get_discus, get_fstadv, tidy_fstadv, tidy_wr, tidy_fcst and tidy_fcst_wr.
• Minor documentation updates
• Small enhancements to tests, vignettes

BUG FIXES

• NA

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• NA

rrricanes 0.2.0-2 (2017-06-22)

NEW FEATURES

• NA

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• NA

BUG FIXES

• Advisories now issued when tropical cyclone development is anticipated, but not yet occurred, and watches and warnings need to be issued. See AL022017, AL032017.
• Added additional time zones (HDT, HST, MDT, MST)
• Appended additional headers (TCE, WTPA, MIATCM, MIAWRKAD1, MIAWRKAP)

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• NA

rrricanes 0.2.0-1 (2017-06-16)

NEW FEATURES

• GIS functions now available. Please note some of these products may not exist for every available cyclone/advisory.
• gis_advisory Typically will include current and past track data, forecast track data, forecast cone (margin of error) and wind radius data.
• gis_breakpoints List of breakpoints typically used for watch/warning areas but is not a requirement.
• gis_latest Retrieves the latest GIS products for all active storms.
• gis_outlook Retrives the latest tropical weather outlook in shapefile format.
• gis_prob_storm_surge Probabilistic storm surge; a polygon dataset for psurge and esurge products with various criteria.
• gis_windfield Wind radius datasets.
• gis_wsp Wind speed probabilities
• gis_download Use this function to download the URLs returned from the above functions.
• shp_to_df added to convert lines and polygons spatial dataframes to dataframes. Points dataframes can be converted using tibble::as_dataframe (target the @data object).

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• Enhanced documentation added online using pkgdown.
• load_storm_data directly returns dataframes. Additionally, retrieval by basin and years removed in favor of importing complete product datasets. Additionally, documentation has been added to the website on using data.world as a third option. The difference between these two options is load_storm_data will return complete datasets. Using data.world will allow users to write custom queries to retrieve data. (#76)

BUG FIXES

• NA

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• Not yet deprecated but a warning that al_prblty_stations, cp_prblty_stations and ep_prblty_stations may be removed on a future release. (#46)
• Support for dplyr 0.5.0 will be removed in future releases in favor of dplyr 0.7.0.

rrricanes 0.1.3 (2017-06-11)

NEW FEATURES

• NA

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• rrricanes.http_sleep to control time to sleep between multiple HTTP requests.
• Clarified documentation for get_fstadv, get_prblty, get_wndprb, tidy_fstadv, tidy_wr, tidy_fcst and tidy_fcst_wr.

BUG FIXES

• tidy_fcst and tidy_fcst_wr would err if all forecast periods were not available for a cyclone. Functions now analyze dataframe to determine what forecast fields exist, then tidies based on the result. (#73)

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• NA

rrricanes 0.1.2 (2017-06-08)

NEW FEATURES

• Changed name from Hurricanes to rrricanes.

• get_storm_data can now be chained to other commands and returns a list of dataframes.

• load_storm_data accesses pre-scraped datasets and returns requested products through the github repo rrricanesdata. This was done to make it quicker to get data. It should not be relied on to get the most immediate data for current storms. However, it should be fairly up-to-date. Original functions can be used if for some reason immediate data access is needed.

• saffir returns Saffir-Simpson classification of tropical cyclones; abbreviated.

• status_abbr_to_str converts storm status abbreviations (i.e., TD, TS, HU) to string.

• twoal and twoep parse tropical weather outlook XML files. Gives current status, if any, of areas of interest in either basin.

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

• Modified numerous regex patterns to ensure data quality.
• tidy_fstadv, tidy_wr, tidy_fcst and tidy_fcst_wr have been added to replaced now-removed fstadv_split().
• Added loop to make multiple attempts at extracting contents from NHC archives. Options rrricanes.http_timeout and rrricanes.http_attempts added to give user more control over this. Default is 3 attempts with no more than 5 permitted.

BUG FIXES

• Too many to recall. Apologies.
• Call to get_storms on some linux distros generated xpath_element error. Corrected. (#67)
• Modify call to get_storm_data. Replaced css parameter in rvest::html_nodes calls with xpath parameter. Some products (notably, get_prblty) do not have a "pre" tag but are text documents (not HTML). Modified scrape_contents to return full contents if "pre" tag doesn't exist. Tested get_discus and get_public; no errors generated. (#68)

DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• fstadv_split. See MINOR IMPROVEMENTS for alternatives.

Hurricanes 0.1.0 (2017-05-12)

Major new features

Retrieve all storm's for a given year (>=1998) and access data from a given storm's history. Can access "current" storm position, structure details, forecast, and discussions.

This release should be considered beta. While I've made every effort to ensure quality there may be an issue here or there. I will work on developing QA/QC scripts as time permits.

Please send any issues or questions to: https://github.com/timtrice/Hurricanes/issues.

Getting Annual Storm Data

Use get_storms to access storm's for a given year.

Getting Storm Data

Use get_storm_data to access one or multiple products for a specific storm.

Storm Discussions (discus)

Not parsed but contains technical information on the cyclone, development tendencies and forecast model tendencies.

Forecast/Advisory (fstadv)

Contains the meat of data. Current storm information, forecast information, wind and sea data. Can use fstadv_split() to break the wide dataframe to multiple, relational dataframes.

Position Estimate (posest)

Contains current position estimate for a given storm. Usually issued during threats to land. Not issued for all storms. Not parsed.

Strike Probabilities (prblty)

Strike probabilities for given locations prior to 2006 (See Wind Speed Probabilities for >= 2006).

Public Advisory (public)

General information on a storm. Not parsed.

Updates (update)

Quick information given when a storm is threatening or undergoes a significant change. Not issued for all storms.

Wind Probabilities (wndprb)

Replaced Strike Probabilities after the 2005 hurricane season. Lists the chances of a location seeing 34kt, 50kt and 64kt winds within a given time frame.

timtrice/rrricanes documentation built on Oct. 11, 2023, 2:25 a.m.