The climdexInput class consists of all the data
necessary to compute the climdex indices. Users will not
need to modify any of the slots in this class. That being
said, users may want or need to repurpose this data for
further analysis. The following description of the data
is aimed at that audience. The data slot contains time series' of daily data
of equal length for each of the provided variables.
Missing days have been replaced with NA. The dates
slot is the corresponding series of dates (of type PCICt)
for the daily data.
The quantiles slot contains quantiles used for
computing the tn/tx 10/90p indices, w/csdi, r95ptot, and
r99ptot. If precipitation data is supplied, the 'prec'
member contains the 95th and 99th percentile values for
precipitation within the base period. For tmin and tmax,
if present each will have a corresponding member in the
slot. Within each of these, there will be an 'inbase' and
'outbase' member, corresponding to thresholds to be used
within the base period (inbase) and outside the base
period (outbase). The 'inbase' member consists of one
percentile for each day of the year, computed using an
n-day (default is 5-day) running window surrounding that
day. These percentiles are computed for at least the 10th
and 90th percentile of the data. For the 'outbase'
member, given n years of data to use as the base period,
there are n * (n - 1) sets of daily quantiles of the same
type as those in 'inbase'.
To ease computation of monthly and annual data,
date.factors contains date factors which group
data into annual and monthly time buckets. They are of
the same length as the time series and can be reused for
computation of any annual or monthly aggregates.
The climdexInput class also includes NA masks for both
monthly and annual as parts of the namasks slot.
Each of these masks consist of a vector of numbers of the
same length as the monthly or annual output data. The
values used are 1 to signify that the data meets the QC
criteria, and NA to signify it does not. Years with more
than (by default) 15 days missing, and months with more
than (by default) 3 days missing, are considered to be of
poor quality and are masked here with NA. These
thresholds can be set when instantiating the object, and
are stored in the max.missing.days slot.
The base.range slot contains vector of type PCICt
containing the first and last day included in the
baseline.
The northern.hemisphere slot contains a boolean
indicating whether the data came from the northern
hemisphere. If FALSE, data is assumed to have come from
the southern hemisphere. This is used when computing
growing season length; if the data is from the southern
hemisphere, growing season length is the growing season
starting in the beginning of July of the year indicated,
running to the end of June of the following year.