<p><div><div><div><div data-show-faces="false" data-height="21" data-width="100" data-layout="button_count" data-send="true" data-href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/rnoaa-new-data-sources-and-ncdc-units/"></div></div><div></div></div><div></div></div>
<div>
(This article was first published on <strong><a href="https://ropensci.org/technotes/2018/12/04/rnoaa-update/"> rOpenSci - open tools for open science</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p>We’ve just released a new version of <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/ropensci/rnoaa" target="_blank">rnoaa</a> with A LOT of changes. Check out<br>
the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/ropensci/rnoaa/releases/tag/v0.8.0" target="_blank">release notes</a><br>
for a complete list of changes.</p>
<p>We’ll highlight a few things in this post:</p>
<ul>
<li>New data sources in the package</li>
<li>NCDC units added to the output of <code>ncdc()</code></li>
</ul>
<p>Links:</p>
<ul>
<li>rnoaa source code: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/ropensci/rnoaa" target="_blank">https://github.com/ropensci/rnoaa</a></li>
<li>rnoaa on CRAN: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/rnoaa/" target="_blank">https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/rnoaa/</a></li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<h2>Installation</h2>
<p>Install the lastest from CRAN</p>
<pre><code>install.packages(&quot;rnoaa&quot;)
</code></pre>
<p>Some binaries are not up yet on CRAN – you can also install from GitHub:</p>
<pre><code>remotes::install_github(&quot;ropensci/rnoaa@v0.8.0&quot;)
</code></pre>
<p>Load <code>rnoaa</code></p>
<pre><code>library(rnoaa)
</code></pre>
<p></p>
<h2>New data sources</h2>
<p>There are three new data sources in the package. There’s more in the works. You<br>
can keep track of new data sources in the package via the <code>newdatasource</code><br>
label in the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/ropensci/rnoaa/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Anewdatasource" target="_blank">issue tracker</a>.</p>
<h3>Blended Sea Winds</h3>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/marineocean-data/blended-global/blended-sea-winds" target="_blank">Blended Sea Winds</a> contains</p>
<blockquote>
<p>globally gridded, high-resolution ocean surface vector winds and wind stresses on a<br>
global 0.25° grid, and multiple time resolutions of six-hourly, daily, monthly,<br>
and 11-year (1995-2005) climatological monthlies.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Data is available from July 9, 1987 to present.</p>
<p>Check out the link above for more information on the data.</p>
<p>In a brief example of getting the data in <code>rnoaa</code>, we get data for the date<br>
October 1st, 2017, and we get daily resolution. The data is provided in<br>
netcdf format.</p>
<pre><code>bsw(date = &quot;2017-10-01&quot;, resolution = &quot;daily&quot;)
#> File /Users/sckott/Library/Caches/R/noaa_bsw/uv/daily/uv20171001rt.nc (NC_FORMAT_CLASSIC):
#> 
#>      3 variables (excluding dimension variables):
#>         float u[lon,lat,zlev,time]   
#>             long_name: Sea Surface Wind: x-component
#>             units: m/s
#>             _FillValue: -9999
#>         float v[lon,lat,zlev,time]   
#>             long_name: Sea Surface Wind: y-component
#>             units: m/s
#>             _FillValue: -9999
#>         float w[lon,lat,zlev,time]   
#>             long_name: Sea Surface Wind: speed as scalar means
#>             units: m/s
#>             _FillValue: -9999
#> 
#>      4 dimensions:
#>         zlev  Size:1
#>             long_name: height above sea level
#>             units: meters
#>         time  Size:1
#>             long_name: Center Time of the Data
#>             units: hours since 1978-01-01 00:00:00
#>         lat  Size:719
#>             long_name: latitude
#>             units: degrees_north
#>             grids: uniform grids from -89.75 to 89.75 by 0.25
#>         lon  Size:1440
#>             long_name: longitude
#>             units: degrees_east
#>             grids: uniform grids from 0.00 to 359.75 by 0.25
#> 
#>     11 global attributes:
#>         Conventions: COARDS, CF-1.0, Unidata Dataset Discovery v1.0
#>         title: NOAA/NCDC Blended daily 0.25-degree Sea Surface Winds
#>         source: Multiple satellite observations: DMSP SSMI F08, F10, F11, F13,F14 F15; TMI; QuikSCAT; AMSR-E; Direction from NCEP Reanalysis-2
#>         summary: Gridded and blended sea surface vector winds from multiple satellites with direction from NCEP Reanalysis-2; Global ocean coverage with a 0.25-degree resolution; The whole datasets covers from July 1987 to present, daily resolution in this dataset; 6-hourly and monthly are also available in other directories; See http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/rsad/blendedseawinds.html and links within for details. Include (u,v) means and scalar mean speed w for comparison
#>         Keywords: sea winds, ocean winds, sea surface winds, air-sea interaction, air-sea flux, wind-driven circulation, Ekman pumping, Ekman transport, ocean upwelling, wind stress, windstress
#>         references: links at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/rsad/blendedseawinds.html
#>         History: Simple spatiotemporally weighted Interpolation (SI), V.1.2. Version 1.2 uses updated satellite retrievals by Remote Sensing System, released in September 2006: SSMI V06, TMI V04, QSCAT V03a. AMSRE V05 was also updated using the new SSMI rain rate
#>         institution: NOAA NESDIS National Climatic Data Center
#>         Contact: Huai-Min.Zhang AT noaa.gov or satorder AT noaa.gov;         ph:1+828-271-4090
#>         Acknowledgment: The gridded data were generated from the multiple satellite observations of DOD, NOAA and NASA (and future others) and wind retrievals of the Remote Sensing Systems, Inc. (http://www.remss.com), using scientific methods such as objective analysis (OA). The OA is only truly objective when the needed statistics are completely known, which may not be always the case.
#>         Data_Calendar_Date: 2017-10-01
</code></pre>
<p></p>
<h3>Local Climatological Data</h3>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-data/land-based-datasets/quality-controlled-local-climatological-data-qclcd" target="_blank">Local Climatological Data</a> consists of</p>
<blockquote>
<p>hourly, daily, and monthly summaries for approximately 1,600 U.S. locations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In some examples, we get data for a single station for two different years.<br>
The data is returned in data.frame format</p>
<pre><code>lcd(station = &quot;01338099999&quot;, year = &quot;2017&quot;)
#> # A tibble: 8,677 x 36
#>    station date  source latitude longitude elevation name  report_type
#>      </code></pre>