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Get Index of Canadian Meteorological Stations

Source: R/met.R
dod.met.index.Rd

Look up information on a Canadian meteorological station, by a fuzzy search on information stored on a gc.ca website. The main use is to find a station ID, to be used with dod.met().

Usage

dod.met.index(
  name,
  max.distance = 0.1,
  url = "https://dd.weather.gc.ca/climate/observations/climate_station_list.csv",
  quiet = FALSE,
  debug = 0
)

Arguments

name

character value use in a name search. The search is done using agrep() with the supplied max.distance value and with ignore.case set to TRUE.

max.distance

numerical value passed to agrep() in the station-name search.

url

the URL of the source file. The default value was tested on May 6, 2024, but this agency tends to change the file location (and data format) without notice, so if you find an error in downloading, please report it as an issue on the project github site.

quiet

a logical value, passed to curl::curl_download(), which does the downloading. If this is TRUE (the default), then the work is done quietly. Until version version 0.1.12, this parameter was called silent, but it was renamed to match the corresponding argument in curl::curl_download(), which may be more familiar to users.

debug

an integer value indicating the level of debugging. If this exceeds 0, then some debugging messages will be printed. This value is passed down to related functions, but with 1 subtracted for each pass.

Details

The source file is at the web location named by the url parameter. (Please contact the author, if the default value fails. It was known to work in May of 2024, but this agency might change the file location or format at any time.) The results are a data frame with information that ought to be easy to interpret. For use with dod.met(), the ID field that is of use is named "Climate.ID". See “Examples” for what might be of interest for hourly data.

Author

Dan Kelley

Examples

if (interactive()) { # sidestep a pkgdown::build_site() error
    # Get index of meteorological data for Halifax, N.S.
    library(dod)
    i <- dod.met.index("halifax")
    names(i) # see what's in these files
    i[, c("Province", "Station.Name", "Climate.ID")]
    # focus on the ones in Nova Scotia
    NS <- grep("nova", i$Province, ignore.case = TRUE)
    i <- i[NS, ]
    i[, c("Province", "Station.Name", "Climate.ID")]
}