News for Package vegperiod

Version 0.4.0

• introduced threshold Tsum.crit for sum of day degrees in function vegperiod()
• made plausibility check optional via new parameter check.data (suggested by @rhabel)
• restructured documentation to provide more details on start and end methods
• acknowledged funder in DESCRIPTION
• fixed a changed URL

Version 0.3.1

• if StdMeteo does not find an end, it now reports the last day of the year instead of 0.

Version 0.3

• fix est.prev parameter used in start method Menzel. Now averages as advertised (Thanks for catching this bug to @awellpott).
• switched to unit testing framework tinytest

Version 0.2.7

• changed temperature plausibility checks because of severe winter 1956 with daily mean temperatures of -27 °C in Germany and even lower and higher daily mean temperatures in climate scenarios.

Version 0.2.6

• fixed change of base URL of DWD open data (Thanks @ckluss for reporting and pointing in the right direction)
• fixed download of recent monthly climate data. Breakage caused by DWD file name schema change (#1). Thanks @rwoerde for reporting.
• corrected minimum R version. Argument fileEncoding was introduced to read.fwf() in R 3.2

Version 0.2.5

• replaced package ‘RCurl’ with ‘curl’ for downloading DWD Data
• stopped importing package ‘methods’
• fixed read.DWDstations() because DWD changed layout of station list
• updated documentation of read.DWDdata() because DWD changed column order of climate data files

Version 0.2.4

• vegperiod() checks if Tavg (daily mean temperature) is between -25 and 35 to catch temperatures multiplied by 10. Sometimes done to store as integers. (thanks to Ronald Bialozyt for reporting a crash)

Version 0.2.3

• vegperiod() reports end of vegetation period always as integer
• new parameter ‘quiet’ to readDWDdata to suppress messages and progessbar of download
• started unit testing with package ‘testthat’

Version 0.2.2

• start.method=‘Ribes uva-crispa’ using leaf out of gooseberry as indicator. Developed by Germany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD).
• est.prev can now be equal to number of provided years
• proper error message if only one year of data provided and previous year’s chill days requested

Version 0.2.1

• cleaned up mangled output of start.method=‘StdMeteo’. StdMeteo now behaves properly and returns a vector.
• use stats::filter() in the package to protected filter() against getting run over by package dplyr (thanks to Cristabel Duran for reporting).

Version 0.2.0

New Features

• read.DWDdata() reads open meteo data from the Climate Data Center (CDC) of Germany’s National Meteorological Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD).
• read.DWDstations() fetches information about available DWD stations

Major Changes

• renamed arguments in vegperiod() to clarify meaning / easier tab completion:
  • first.avg -> est.prev
  • temp.sum -> Tsum.out
  • method.start -> start.method
  • method.end -> end.method
• renamed method StdClimatolgy to StdMeteo / ETCCDI in vegperiod() and brought calculations into compliance with ETCCDI standard

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• added a hack in method LWF-BROOK90 of vegperiod() to adjust for different arithmetic precision in VBA version (thanks to Paul Schmidt-Walter for providing climate.in files for comparision and help finding the bug)
• fixed bug leading to crash of vegperiod() if argument first.avg=0 (thanks to Ronald Bialozyt for reporting)
• the argument “dates” of vegperiod() accepts now also character strings understood by as.Date()
• rewrote help-page of vegperiod() and added references for all methods

Version 0.1.0

• Intial version