weatherData is a collection of functions that will fetch weather (Temperature, Pressure, Humidity etc.) data from the Web for you as clean data frame.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Q1: Why am I not getting the data I expect?
- Q2: Why can't I get data for a very large date range?
- Q3: Can I get data from a personal Weather Station?
Q1: Why am I not getting the data I expect?
Answer: The first place to check is the website. All weatherData functions eventually get data from a comma-separated file.
So the logical place to start is to go to that page (from your web browser) and check that the data is indeed there.
Q2: Why can't I get data for a very large date range?
Answer: If you try to get data for a date range much larger than 1 year, you won't get back the full data.
For example, if you try using getSummarizedWeather you will get only around 400 rows. This seems to be a limit imposed by the weather underground site.
Workaround: You can get it in multiple chunks. Say one year at a time. Then you can combine them all into one giant dataframe, using rbind(). One bit of caution: Sometimes the names of the different dataframes change. You have to first convert them all to one common set of column names before rbind can work. (Use with caution!)
Q3: Can I get data from a personal Weather Station?
Note: This feature is now available only from Github Not yet on CRAN.
Answer: If you specify station_type="id" you can fetch data from personal weather stations that Weather Underground supports. There are 1000s of such stations all over the world. Get the station_id by checking the weather underground website.
Then do the following:
library(devtools)
install_github("weatherData", "Ram-N")
library(weatherData)
#important to set the station_type to be "id"
getDetailedWeather("ISKHALBR2", "2013-08-23", station_type="id")
#get specific columns
getDetailedWeather("ISKHALBR2", "2013-08-23", station_type="id",
opt_custom_columns=T,
custom_columns = c(3,4))