weatherData

weatherData is a collection of functions that will fetch weather (Temperature, Pressure, Humidity etc.) data from the Web for you as clean data frame.

weatherData

Several examples can be found in the main page

More Examples

How to find the station_id for a Location

Let's say that we want to search for weather in Buffalo. But we are interested in Buffalo, WY, not Buffalo,NY.

getStationCode("Buffalo")

#If we want to be more specific about the location of interest
#We can specify the additional parameter region
getStationCode("Buffalo", region="WY") 

This function will return a record containing matches to a given station name, and the 4 letter code can then be used in the arguments to other functions such as getWeatherForDate()

> getStationCode("Buffalo", region="WY")      
  [[1]]
       Station State airportCode
  1588 Buffalo    WY        KBYG

So, we can see that the 4-letter airportCode that we are interested in is KBYG

Check if Data is Available

In general, it is a good idea to first check if data is available for our location and dates of interest. Throughout the package, we make a distinction between a Date and a Date Range

checkDataAvailability("KBYG", "2011-01-02") #checking for a single date
checkDataAvailabilityForDateRange("SFO", "2010-10-29", "2013-01-12") #checking for a date range

The first command searches for Data Availability (in Weather Underground) for the date specified. The second command above will see if weather data is available for the Airport supplied ("SFO") for the two end dates supplied: for the 20th Oct 2010 and for Jan 12th 2013 in this case.

These commands are useful for a quick check, before invoking getDateRangeWeather

Getting the current temperature of a Location

getCurrentTemperature("PIT")

If you are writing functions that use the current (latest) temperature for any location, you can try using the getCurrentTemperature function. This function will get the latest recorded Temperature for a give city or station. Any valid US Airport code or International 4-letter Airport Weather Code will usually work. For example "EGLL" for London, UK. This function returns a NULL if it is unable to fetch the temperature, so you can test for that using is.null().

Caution: This function uses the Sys.Date to learn today's date. So it might be a good idea to test it before including it in your script.

List of the different functions available in weatherData

Functions to Check if Data is available

• checkDataAvailability Check if WeatherUnderground has Data for given station and date
• checkDataAvailabilityForDateRange Quick Check to see if WeatherUnderground has Weather Data for given station for a range of dates
• checkSummarizedDataAvailability Quick Check to see if WeatherUnderground has Summarized Weather Data for given station for a custom range of dates

Helper Functions

• showAvailableColumns Shows all the available Weather Data Columns
• getStationCode Gets the Weather Station code for a location (in the US)
• getCurrentTemperature Get the latest recorded temperature for a location

Core Functions that fetch Weather Data

• getDetailedWeather Gets weather data for a single date (All records)
• getSummarizedWeather Gets daily summary weather data (One record per day)

Convenience Wrappers

• getWeatherForDate Getting data for a range of dates
• getWeatherForYear Get weather data for one full year

Built-in Datasets

There are also a number of data sets that come with the package. Be sure to check them out as well.

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