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rdwd

rdwd is an R package to select, download and read climate data from the German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD).
The DWD provides thousands of datasets with weather observations online at opendata.dwd.de.
Since May 2019, rdwd also supports reading the Radolan (binary) raster data at grids_germany.

rdwd is available on CRAN:

It has been presented at FOSDEM 2017 and UseR!2017 in Brussels, featured in Rstudios data package list and written about in OSOR.

Documentation

A vignette with more information, examples, use cases and an interactive map of the DWD stations can be found at https://bookdown.org/brry/rdwd

Usage

Usage for observational weather data from the measuring stations usually looks something like the following:

# Download and install (once only):
install.packages("rdwd")

# Load the package into library (needed in every R session):
library(rdwd)

# select a dataset (e.g. last year's daily climate data from Potsdam City):
link <- selectDWD("Potsdam", res="daily", var="kl", per="recent")

# Actually download that dataset, returning the local storage file name:
file <- dataDWD(link, read=FALSE)

# Read the file from the zip folder:
clim <- readDWD(file, varnames=TRUE)

# Inspect the data.frame:
str(clim)

For data interpolated onto a 1 km raster, including radar data up to the last hour, see the corresponding chapter in the vignette.

Installation

Normal

install.packages("rdwd")

Latest version

if(!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly=TRUE)) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("brry/rdwd")

Full

Suggested (not mandatory) dependencies:

install.packages("rdwd", dependencies="Suggests") 
  • RCurl for indexFTP and selectDWD(..., current=TRUE)
  • data.table for readDWD(..., fread=TRUE)
  • raster, R.utils, ncdf4, dwdradar for readDWD with gridded data
  • readr for readDWD.stand(..., fast=TRUE)
  • knitr, rmarkdown, testthat for recreating the vignette and local testing
  • leaflet, OSMscale for interactive/static maps, see OSMscale installation tips

Note: on Linux (Ubuntu), install RCurl via the terminal (CTRL+ALT+T, note lowercase rcurl):

sudo apt install r-cran-rcurl

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Version

Install

install.packages('rdwd')

Monthly Downloads

578

Version

1.2.0

License

GPL (>= 2)

Issues

Pull Requests

Stars

Forks

Maintainer

Berry Boessenkool

Last Published

October 28th, 2019

Functions in rdwd (1.2.0)

lldist

distance between lat-long coordinates
indexFTP

Create a recursive index of an FTP Server
dataDWD

Download data from the DWD CDC FTP Server
readDWD.stand

read subdaily/standard_format dwd data
readDWD.raster

read dwd gridded raster data
projectRasterDWD

project DWD raster data
rdwd

Handle Climate Data from DWD (German Weather Service)
readDWD.multia

read multi_annual dwd data
readDWD.meta

read dwd metadata (Beschreibung*.txt files)
runLocalTests

run local tests of rdwd
checkSuggestedPackage

check suggested package for availability
createIndex

Create file and meta index of the DWD CDC FTP Server
selectDWD

Select data from the DWD CDC FTP Server
findID

find DWD weather station ID from name
dirDWD

directory management for rdwd
readDWD.data

read regular dwd data
metaInfo

Information for a station ID on the DWD CDC FTP server
localtestdir

local test data directory
nearbyStations

Find DWD stations close to given coordinates
readDWD.binary

read dwd gridded radolan binary data
index

Indexes of files and metadata on the DWD CDC FTP server
readDWD

Process data from the DWD CDC FTP Server
readDWD.nc

read dwd netcdf data
newColumnNames

Enhance readDWD column names
release_questions

Reminders when using devtools::release
rowDisplay

Create leaflet map popup from data.frame rows
readDWD.radar

read dwd gridded radolan radar data
updateIndexes

update rdwd indexes
readDWD.asc

read dwd gridded radolan asc data
readVars

Process data from the DWD CDC FTP Server
readMeta

Process data from the DWD CDC FTP Server
DEU

Map of German states (Bundeslaender) from GADM through the raster package
EUR

Map of Western European countries through the rworldmap package
checkIndex

check indexes
addBorders

add country and Bundesland borders to a map
dwdparams

DWD parameter explanations
dwdbase

DWD FTP Server base URL