rdwd

rdwd is an R package to select, download and read climate data from the German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD). They provide over 25 thousand datasets with weather observations online at ftp://ftp-cdc.dwd.de/pub/CDC/observations_germany/climate.

Usage of the package will usually look something like the following:

# download and install the rdwd package (only needed once):
install.packages("rdwd")

# load the package into library (needed in every R session):
library(rdwd)

# view package documentation:
?rdwd

# select a dataset (e.g. last year's daily climate data from Potsdam City):
link <- selectDWD("Potsdam", res="daily", var="kl", per="recent")

# Actually download that dataset, returning the local storage file name:
file <- dataDWD(link, read=FALSE)

# Read the file from the zip folder:
clim <- readDWD(file)

# Inspect the data.frame:
str(clim)

You can also select datasets with the interactive map. Further instructions and examples are available in the package vignette.

vignette("mapDWD") # interactive map, likely faster than CRAN link above
vignette("rdwd")   # package instructions and examples

A real-life usage example of the package can be found at https://github.com/brry/prectemp/blob/master/Code_analysis.R