nasapower: NASA POWER Global Meteorology, Surface Solar Energy and Climatology Data Client

nasapower aims to make it quick and easy to automate downloading NASA-POWER global meteorology, surface solar energy and climatology data in your R session as a tidy data frame tibble object for analysis and use in modelling or other purposes. POWER (Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resource) data are freely available for download at a resolution of 1/2 arc degree longitude by 1/2 arc degree latitude.

nasapower offers further functionality to quickly and easily generate an APSIM package metFile format text file from POWER data for use in the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM) or an ICASA format text files for use in Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT).

Please see https://power.larc.nasa.gov/ for more on the data and other ways to access it and other forms of data available, e.g., your web browser or an ESRI REST API.

Quick start

nasapower can easily be installed using the following code.

From CRAN

The stable version is available through CRAN.

install.packages("nasapower")

From GitHub for the version in-development

A development version that may have new features or bug fixes is available through GitHub.

if (!require(devtools)) {
  install.packages("devtools")
}

devtools::install_github("ropensci/nasapower",
                         build_vignettes = TRUE
)

Example

Fetch daily “AG” community temperature, relative humidity and precipitation for January 1 1985 for Kingsthorpe, Queensland, Australia.

library(nasapower)
daily_ag <- get_power(community = "AG",
                      lonlat = c(151.81, -27.48),
                      pars = c("RH2M", "T2M", "PRECTOT"),
                      dates = "1985-01-01",
                      temporal_average = "DAILY"
                      )
                    
daily_ag
#> NASA/POWER SRB/FLASHFlux/MERRA2/GEOS 5.12.4 (FP-IT) 0.5 x 0.5 Degree Daily Averaged Data  
#>  Dates (month/day/year): 01/01/1985 through 01/01/1985  
#>  Location: Latitude  -27.48   Longitude 151.81  
#>  Elevation from MERRA-2: Average for 1/2x1/2 degree lat/lon region = 434.55 meters   Site = na  
#>  Climate zone: na (reference Briggs et al: http://www.energycodes.gov)  
#>  Value for missing model data cannot be computed or out of model availability range: -99  
#>  
#>  Parameters: 
#>  PRECTOT MERRA2 1/2x1/2 Precipitation (mm day-1) ;
#>  RH2M MERRA2 1/2x1/2 Relative Humidity at 2 Meters (%) ;
#>  T2M MERRA2 1/2x1/2 Temperature at 2 Meters (C)  
#>  
#> # A tibble: 1 x 10
#>     LON   LAT  YEAR    MM    DD   DOY YYYYMMDD    RH2M   T2M PRECTOT
#>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <int> <int> <int> <date>     <dbl> <dbl>   <dbl>
#> 1  152. -27.5  1985     1     1     1 1985-01-01  48.9  25.1    1.07

Documentation

More documentation is available in the vignette in your R session, vignette("nasapower") or available online, https://docs.ropensci.org/nasapower/.

Use of POWER Data

While nasapower does not redistribute the data or provide it in any way, we encourage users to follow the requests of the POWER Project Team.

When POWER data products are used in a publication, we request the following acknowledgement be included: “These data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center POWER Project funded through the NASA Earth Science Directorate Applied Science Program.”

Meta

• Please report any issues or bugs.

• License: MIT

• Get citation information for nasapower in R by typing citation(package = "nasapower").

• Please note that the nasapower project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in the nasapower project you agree to abide by its terms.

• The U.S. Earth System Research Laboratory, Physical Science Division of the National Atmospheric & Oceanic Administration (NOAA) maintains a list of gridded climate data sets that provide different data and different resolutions https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/.

References

https://power.larc.nasa.gov

https://power.larc.nasa.gov/documents/POWER_Data_v9_methodology.pdf