SWTools: Helper Tools for Australian Hydrologists

Functions to speed up workflow for hydrological analysis. Focused on Australian climate data (SILO climate data), hydrological models (eWater Source) and South Australian hydrological data (from Water Data SA).

SILO functions:

SILO is a database of Australian climate data from 1889 to the present. It provides daily meteorological datasets for a range of climate variables in ready-to-use formats suitable for biophysical modelling, research and climate applications SILO Website.

These functions allow SILO data to be downloaded from the SILO Website, imported into R, calculate some basic statistics and undertake some quality assurance tests to easily visualise how much data has been interpolated, and to compare nearby sites to identify potential data issues. SILODownload, SILOLoad and SILOReport functions allow a vector of SILO sites to be downloaded and summarised in a Microsoft Word report.

Source and Veneer functions:

eWater Source is the Australia’s national hydrological modelling platform, and is increasing in use around the world. Functions are included to write SILO climate data to the format expected for Source SILOWriteforSource, and reading in model outputs, read_res.csv.

Veneer is a RESTful API for interacting with Source models. Functions are included that are wrappers for Veneer, to build URLs to get or set data in the Source model, and process the json object returned.

Aquarius functions:

South Australia’s hydrological data is hosted on Water Data SA, powered by an Aquatic Informatics Aquarius database. The Export link creates URLs that enable multiple datasets to be downloaded. AQWPDownload builds these URLs to download data in json format, and AWQPLoad loads this json file into the R interface.

Installation

You can install the released version of SWTools from CRAN with:

install.packages("SWTools")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("matt-s-gibbs/swtools")