GSODR (version 1.0.3)

reformat_GSOD: Clean, reformat and generate new variables from GSOD weather data

Description

This function automates cleaning and reformatting of GSOD, https://data.noaa.gov/dataset/global-surface-summary-of-the-day-gsod, station files in "WMO-WBAN-YYYY.op.gz" format that have been downloaded from the United States National Center for Environmental Information's (NCEI) FTP server.

Usage

reformat_GSOD(dsn = NULL, file_list = NULL)

Arguments

dsn

User supplied file path to location of station file data on local disk for reformatting.

file_list

User supplied list of files of station data on local disk for reformatting.

Value

A data.frame object of weather data or a comma-separated value (CSV) or GeoPackage (GPKG) file saved to local disk.

Details

For automated downloading and processing see the get_GSOD function which provides expanded functionality for automatically downloading and expanding annual GSOD files and cleaning station files.

This function reformats the data into a more usable form and calculates three new elements; saturation vapour pressure (es), actual vapour pressure (ea) and relative humidity (RH). All units are converted to International System of Units (SI), e.g., Fahrenheit to Celsius and inches to millimetres. Alternative elevation measurements are supplied for missing values or values found to be questionable based on the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research's Consortium for Spatial Information group's (CGIAR-CSI) Shuttle Radar Topography Mission 90 metre (SRTM 90m) digital elevation data based on NASA's original SRTM 90m data.

Data summarise each year by station, which include vapour pressure and relative humidity elements calculated from existing data in GSOD.

All missing values in resulting files are represented as NA regardless of which field they occur in.

Only station files in ".op.gz" file format are supported by this function. If you have downloaded the full annual "gsod_YYYY.tar" file you will need to extract the individual station files first to use this function.

For a complete list of the fields and desciption of the contents and units, please refer to the vignette("GSODR_output_fields", package = "GSODR").

References

Jarvis, A., Reuter, H.I, Nelson, A., Guevara, E. (2008) Hole-filled SRTM for the globe Version 4, available from the CGIAR-CSI SRTM 90m Database http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org

See Also

get_GSOD

Examples

# NOT RUN {
# Reformat station data files in local directory
x <- reformat_GSOD(dsn = "~/tmp")

# Reformat a list of data files
y <- c("~/GSOD/gsod_1960/200490-99999-1960.op.gz",
       "~/GSOD/gsod_1961/200490-99999-1961.op.gz")
x <- reformat_GSOD(file_list = y)
# }
# NOT RUN {
# }