How To Download Data From Weather Underground R UPDATED
How To Download Data From Weather Underground R
Analyzing and Visualizing Conditions Data with R
Having moved from the West of Ireland to the Pacific North W I was interested to observe that, while both people regularly mutter near the rain, the rainfall patterns appeared quite different. That initial ascertainment led me to wonder how similar, or different, the patterns are between the ii regions? This blog describes the process of accessing historical weather data, processing the dataframes with R, and visualizing the findings with R's ggplot2 package. In doing so I volition hopefully achieve a decision as to which 'West Coast' has more cause to mutter well-nigh rainfall. The weather condition stations we'll reference are located at Shannon and Vancouver international airports.
Sourcing and Accessing Data
Initial Google searches will likely lead to the R package 'weatherData'. It's worth noting that despite its prominence in google search results, this package no longer works due to its API source, Weather Hole-and-corner, moving to a paid model. A follow-upwards search may reference Atmospheric condition Undercover's ain R package, though it's worth noting that their free-tier requires users to maintain a personal weather station in guild to receive an API cardinal.
I institute the near appropriate solution was to pull information directly from the relevant national meteorological services. Equally many meteorological services have begun publishing their ain R packages in contempo years, Canadian data is accessible from the 'weathercan' bundle. The Irish Meteorological Service, Met Éireann, does not maintain an R package, simply provides csv data for download from met.ie.
Determining Metrics
While Irish gaelic records track all forms of precipitation under a unmarried count, Canadian records differentiate between 'total pelting' and 'total precipitation'. The latter includes all forms of precipitation while the one-time includes 'all liquid precipitation' but excludes snowfall. As snow is far more mutual in Vancouver than Shannon and the subject of this study is rainfall, it's tempting to compare Shannon's total atmospheric precipitation to Vancouver'due south total liquid precipitation. Ultimately though, it makes the most sense to stay consistent and compare identical metrics.
Importing Information
For the csv file from met.ie, it's necessary to read from line 25 onwards, as the lines before this contain the dataset's glossary. For the Canadian data, information technology's necessary to concatenate information from ii datasets as Vancouver International Drome's weather station inverse in June 2013.
Standardizing the Data Frames
In order to efficiently piece of work with these data frames, information technology'due south necessary to format their date columns, restrict their date ranges, and standardize their cavalcade names.
Computing the Highest Count of Consecutive Dry Days for each Year
My arroyo was to group each period of consecutive dry days with a unique id for each, before using these ids to get the highest count for each yr.
The data showed that Vancouver consistently had the highest number of consecutive dry days.
The data showed that Vancouver's driest consecutive periods were typically in the months of July-September while Shannon was far less predictable. These dates could be included as tooltip values if creating interactive plots.
Get Monthly Insights
In terms of monthly insights, I was interested in total precipitation volume, volume past ranges, and counting dry days (days with 0mm atmospheric precipitation). I also checked for NA values, of which there were 28 for Vancouver and 0 for Shannon.
The resulting plots show greater precipitation volumes in Vancouver for the months of Oct to April, and higher counts of dry days in Vancouver for all but the calendar month of March.
Calculate for mm Ranges
For plotting the precipitation range columns, information technology was necessary to convert the dataframe to long format in order to plot the data by individual facets.
This plot required more than customization than the others and included a custom legend.
Conclusion
The findings show that Vancouver gets higher volumes of precipitation in shorter, isolated periods, while maintaining clear seasons with far less rain in Summertime. In contrast, Shannon typically has far fewer sequent dry days and far more days with 0 to v mm of rainfall.
Ultimately, with something as arbitrary as complaining about the conditions, people are always going to notice an angle to complaining their own experiences. In that spirit I'1000 going to conclude that Ireland has more crusade to complain on the grounds that its weather requires its people to carry umbrellas on a college number of days per yr.
This projection'southward source lawmaking is viewable on GitHub.
DOWNLOAD HERE
Posted by: profittmintwoubity1970.blogspot.com
