rrricanes

rrricanes is a web-scraping library for R designed to deliver hurricane data (past and current) into well-organized datasets. With these datasets you can explore past hurricane tracks, forecasts and structure elements.

This documentation and additional help articles can be found online.

Text products (Forecast/Advisory, Public Advisory, Discussions and Probabilities) are only available from 1998 to current. An effort will be made to add prior data as available.

Getting Storms

List all storms that have developed by year and basin. Year must be in a four-digit format (%Y) and no earlier than 1998. Basin can be one or both of Atlantic ("AL") or East Pacific ("EP").

get_storms

List all storms by year, basin

Getting Storm Data

get_storm_data can be used to select multiple products, multiple storms and from multiple basins.

Additional text products are:

get_discus

Storm Discussions

get_fstadv

Forecast/Advisory. These products contain a bulk of the information for tropical cyclones including current position, structure, forecast position and forecast structure.

get_posest

Position Estimates. Rare and used generally for threatening cyclones. This product was discontinued after the 2013 season and is now issued as get_update.

get_prblty

Strike Probabilities. Show the probability of the center of a cyclone passing within 65nm of a location for a given forecast period. This product was discontinued after 2005, replaced with get_wndprb.

get_public

Public Advisory. General non-structured information exists in these products.

get_update

Updates. Generally issued when a cyclone undergoes a sudden change that requires immediate notice.

get_wndprb

Wind Speed Probability. Lists the probability of a location experiencing a minimum of 35kt, 50kt or 64kt winds for an alotted forecast period or accumulated probability. This product replaced get_prblty after the 2005 season.

The products above may take some time to load if the NHC website is slow (as is often the case, unfortunately). For all storm advisories issued outside of the current month, use the rrricanesdata package.

To install rrricanesdata, run

install.packages("rrricanesdata", repos = "https://timtrice.github.io/drat/", type = "source")

See vignette("installing_rrricanesdata", package = "rrricanes") for more information.

GIS Data

For enhanced plotting of storm data, several GIS datasets are available. The core GIS functions return URLs to help you refine the data you wish to view. (Some products will not exist for all storms/advisories). These products are:

gis_advisory

Past track, current position, forecast and wind radii

gis_breakpoints

Breakpoints for watches and warnings

gis_latest

All available GIS products for active cyclones

gis_outlook

Tropical Weather Outlook

gis_prob_storm_surge

Probabilistic Storm Surge

gis_windfield

Wind Radii

gis_wsp

Wind Speed Probabilities

gis_download will download the datasets from the above functions.

Some GIS datasets will need to be converted to dataframes to plot geoms. Use shp_to_df to convert SpatialLinesDataFrames and SpatialPolygonsDataFrames. SpatialPointsDataFrames can be converted using tibble::as_data_frame targeting the @data object.

Package Options

dplyr.show_progress displays the dplyr progress bar when scraping raw product datasets. In get_storms, it is based on the number of years being requested. In the product functions (i.e., get_fstadv) it is based on the number of advisories. It can be misleading when calling get_storm_data because it shows the progress of working through a storm's product advisories but will reset on new products/storms.

dplyr.show_progress displays the dplyr progress bar when scraping raw product datasets. In get_storms, it is based on the number of years being requested. In the product functions (i.e., get_fstadv) it is based on the number of advisories. It can be misleading when calling get_storm_data because it shows the progress of working through a storm's product advisories but will reset on new products/storms.

rrricanes.working_msg is set to FALSE by default. When TRUE, it will list the current storm, advisory and date being worked.