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Get information on the GHCND weather stations

Source: R/ghcnd_stations.R
ghcnd_stations.Rd

This function returns an object with a dataframe with meta-information about all available GHCND weather stations.

Usage

ghcnd_stations(refresh = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

refresh

(logical) If TRUE force re-download of data. Default: FALSE

...

In the case of ghcnd() additional curl options to pass through to crul::HttpClient. In the case of ghcnd_read further options passed on to read.csv

Value

This function returns a tibble (dataframe) with a weather station on each row with the following columns:

  • id: The weather station's ID number. The first two letters denote the country (using FIPS country codes).

  • latitude: The station's latitude, in decimal degrees. Southern latitudes will be negative.

  • longitude: The station's longitude, in decimal degrees. Western longitudes will be negative.

  • elevation: The station's elevation, in meters.

  • name: The station's name.

  • gsn_flag: "GSN" if the monitor belongs to the GCOS Surface Network (GSN). Otherwise either blank or missing.

  • wmo_id: If the station has a WMO number, this column gives that number. Otherwise either blank or missing.

  • element: A weather variable recorded at some point during that station's history. See the link below in "References" for definitions of the abbreviations used for this variable.

  • first_year: The first year of data available at that station for that weather element.

  • last_year: The last year of data available at that station for that weather element.

If a weather station has data on more than one weather variable, it will be represented in multiple rows of this output dataframe.

Note

Since this function is pulling a large dataset by ftp, it may take a while to run.

References

For more documentation on the returned dataset, see http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/readme.txt

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Get stations, ghcnd-stations and ghcnd-inventory merged
(stations <- ghcnd_stations())

library(dplyr)
# filter by state
stations %>% filter(state == "IL")
stations %>% filter(state == "OR")
# those without state values
stations %>% filter(state == "")
# filter by element
stations %>% filter(element == "PRCP")
# filter by id prefix
stations %>% filter(grepl("^AF", id))
stations %>% filter(grepl("^AFM", id))
# filter by station long name
stations %>% filter(name == "CALLATHARRA")
} # }