inst/doc/README.md

In wasquith-usgs/utc2nwislocal: UTC Date-Times to NWIS Local Time-Zone Codes using UTC Offsets

README (./utc2niwslocal/inst/doc/README.md)

Author: William H. Asquith

Point of contact: William H. Asquith ([e-mail])

DISCUSSION

This folder to accompany the utc2nwislocal R package contains the R code (R Development Core Team, 2020) used to generate the sysdata.rda file that resides in the ./utc2nwislocal/R directory. The R code is contained in file buildSYSDATA(R).txt, which will read the plain-text pipe-delimited file NWIStzCodes.txt of 53 time zones that is provided in this (./utc2nwislocal/inst/doc/) directory.

The NWIStzCodes.txt file originally came from the .xlsx spreadsheet file of the same name that is also in this directory, and again in turn, the file was near verbatim derived from a tab-delimited file acquired from the U.S. Geological Survey National Water Information System (NWIS) (U.S. Geological Survey, 2019) time zone table through utc2nwislocal package co-author Ronald C. Seanor as a USGS database administrator in July, 2017 (https://help.waterdata.usgs.gov/code/tz_query?fmt=html) [accessed October 22, 2019] (https://help.waterdata.usgs.gov/code/water_level_dtacy_cd_query?fmt=html) [accessed October 22, 2019].

The primary modification by the author to create the NWIStzCodes.txt was the population of missing fields with the character string "--". The author reports challenges in one or more of the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) offset fields for the Newfoundland time zones in which the spreadsheet mysteriously muddled "-NN:NN" fields into numbers and not strings. It is advised to import into a spreadsheet that data as text columns when, if ever needed, updating the ./utc2nwislocal/R/sysdata.rda file.

REFERENCES

R Development Core Team, 2020, R---A language and environment for statistical computing, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria, version 3.6.3, accessed on March 10, 2020, at https://www.R-project.org.

U.S. Geological Survey, 2019, USGS water data for the Nation: U.S. Geological Survey National Water Information System database, accessed August 9, 2019, at https://doi.org/10.5066/F7P55KJN.

wasquith-usgs/utc2nwislocal documentation built on Oct. 24, 2020, 4:29 p.m.