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.