USweather is a collection of functions and examples to interact with APIs - “Application Program Interfaces” - and download weather and climate data for further use. The goal is to have researchers at Fermilab, UT Austin, and Temple collaborate on this project and share resources and approaches so we obtain and use this data in a way that follows FAIR data principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data - (Wilkinson et al., 2016)).
We need two major types of data:
1. Daily weather data for each planting location from, say, April 2018 until the present.
2. Historical weather data for each location of origin for each switchgrass genotype that we have geocoordinates of collection for.
We may also need soil data, and future climate data, but these can be added as required.
You can install the development version from GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("Alice-MacQueen/USweather")If this doesn’t work, please fork the repository to your GitHub and make changes there, or in your own version of RStudio, then submit changes back to USweather as a pull request.
Three vignettes are included in the package at the moment. The one that actually looks at functions included in this R package is called “Get_mesonet_data.Rmd”. It shows you the current functions and pipeline put in place to get a certain set of weather data from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. It uses functions from the R package “httr”.
There are also vignettes to get weather data from NOAA and from the World Bank Climate data. These use functions in the R packages “rnoaa” and “rWBclimate”.