Package: GSODR
Type: Package
Title: Download, Clean and Generate New Variables from GSOD Data
Version: 0.1.5
Authors@R: c(person("Adam", "Sparks", role = c("aut", "cre"),
    email = "adamhsparks@gmail.com"),
    person("Tomislav", "Hengl", role = "ctb",
    email = "tom.hengl@wur.nl"),
    person("Andy", "Nelson", role = "ctb",
    email = "dr.andy.nelson@gmail.com"),
    person("Kay", "Sumfleth", role = "ctb",
    email = "kay@sumfleth.de"))
Maintainer: Adam Sparks <adamhsparks@gmail.com>
Description: Download, clean and reformat weather data from USA National
    Climatic Data Center (NCDC) Global Surface Summary of the Day (GSOD) weather
    stations,
    <https://data.noaa.gov/dataset/global-surface-summary-of-the-day-gsod>.
    The function, get_GSOD(), retrieves data from the GSOD ftp site and
    reformats it from United States Customary System (USCS) units to metric
    units, also for convenience elevation is converted from decimetres to
    metres. Stations are individually checked for number of missing days, as
    defined by the user, to assure data quality. Stations with too many missing
    observations are omitted from final file. Also omitted are stations with a
    latitude of < -90 or > 90 or longitude of < - 180 or > 180. Output is
    returned as a comma-separated values (CSV) file written to disk in a
    location selected by the user, which summarises each year by station and
    includes new variables: actual and saturation vapor pressure and relative
    humidity calculated from the original GSOD data. The resulting files can be
    as large as 500mb depending on the user's stringency for missing data and
    geographic area of interest. Be sure to have sufficient RAM and disk space
    as well as a reasonably fast internet connection to use this package to
    perform this operation. However, for much smaller and more manageable data
    sets, an individual country of interest may be selected as well as only
    stations falling between -60/60 degrees latitude for agroclimatology work.
    The resulting files include station data (e.g., station name, country,
    latitude, longitude, elevation) for use in a geographic information system
    (GIS). The function was largely based on T. Hengl's 'getGSOD.R' script,
    available from
    <http://spatial-analyst.net/book/system/files/getGSOD.R> with enhancements
    to be more cross-platform, faster and more flexible. Currently flags are
    maintained for all of the columns except for MIN/MAX. In the original
    MIN/MAX columns of the GSOD data, "blank indicates max temp was taken from
    the explicit max temp report and not from the 'hourly' data. * indicates max
    temp was derived from the hourly data (i.e., highest hourly or
    synoptic-reported temperature).", GSOD readme.txt
    <http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/readme.txt>. For CSV files
    resulting from GSODR the flags are stripped.
Depends: R (>= 3.0.0)
License: GPL (>= 3)
Imports: countrycode, curl, data.table, dplyr, lubridate, raster,
        readr, stats, stringr, tidyr, utils
RoxygenNote: 5.0.1
Encoding: UTF-8
NeedsCompilation: no
Packaged: 2016-05-16 23:02:59 UTC; asparks
Author: Adam Sparks [aut, cre],
  Tomislav Hengl [ctb],
  Andy Nelson [ctb],
  Kay Sumfleth [ctb]
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2016-05-17 01:11:40
