mesowest: Simple R functions for working with the Mesowest / SynopticLabs climate data API

mesowest provides utilities for interfacing with the mesowest API using R

Installation

library(devtools)
install_github('fickse/mesowest')

Authentication

After you have obtained an API key, request a token...

library(mesowest)

requestToken(apikey = "YoUrApIkEY918202s")

# or interactively choose a text file with the key...
requestToken()

The token is saved to a text file in your root directory (~/)

Getting data

Services are accessed through the function mesowest::mw Parameters can be input as named arguments

mw(service = 'metadata', complete=1, state='UT', county='Garfield')

If this results in awkward nested dataframes, include jsonsimplify = FALSE as an argument.

Data can be queried using named parameters in the api

Timeseries

# request hourly timeseries data
d <- mw(service = 'timeseries', stid ='SFLU1', vars = c('air_temp', 'relative_humidity'), start = '201610250001', end = '201610260001', jsonsimplify= TRUE)

# parsing the nested lists
clim <- data.frame( lapply( d$STATION$OBSERVATIONS, unlist) )

Latest data

d <- mw(service = 'latest', county = 'Garfield', state = 'UT', vars = 'air_temp')

cbind(d$STATION$STID,  d$STATION$OBSERVATIONS)

Precip

# requesting hourly totals
mw(service = 'precipitation', stid='SFLU1', start =  '201610250010', end ='201611250001', pmode='intervals', interval = 'hour', jsonsimplify = TRUE, returnURL =FALSE)

A quick reference for parameters can be accessed with getparams()

# all parameters for all services
getparams()

# parameters for a specific service
getparams('networks')

There is also a shortcut api call to list variables

mwvariables()

Debugging

The mw() function generates an API request which may be inspected by setting returnURL = TRUE.

E.g. this query

mw(service = 'latest', county = 'Garfield', state = 'UT', vars = 'air_temp', returnURL = TRUE)`

returns this:
http://api.mesowest.net/v2/stations/latest?&token=XX_YOURTOKEN_XX&county=Garfield&state=UT&vars=air_temp

Note: This package was created independently from SynopticLabs, MesoWest, or any associates. It is intended to be used for research purposes only.

wporter/mesowest