MesoWest as data source

ghost commented 8 years ago

Add MesoWest as a data source for weatherData. It does have a published API.

AFAIK, no other R package connects to MesoWest, so this would make a contribution.

archenemies commented 7 years ago

@wshatpud: Your issue helped me realize that I should be getting my data from MesoWest. Here's something I hacked up to parse their CSV output. Maybe you already have something better, but I figured it may help someone if I share this. Thanks.

read_mesonet_csv=function(loc) {
  if(length(grep("^http:",loc))) {
    str=system2("wget",c(shQuote(loc),"-O","-"),stdout=T)
  } else {
    str=readLines(loc);
  }
  # remove comments
  str=str[substr(str,1,1) != "#"]
  # remove "units" row
  units=unlist(strsplit(str[2],","))
  str=str[-2]
  # read header row
  header=unlist(strsplit(str[1],","))
  nc=length(header)

  ## the last field can contain a comma, we need to replace it with
  ## e.g. a semicolon. example (was "Light Rain,Fog"):
  # KOAK,2016-12-08T05:20:00Z,30.11,46.4,87.19,11.99,70.0,,,2493.0,,,0.04,,166.0,294.0,,,4.0,,METAR KOAK 080520Z AUTO 07012KT 4SM -RA BR FEW016 OVC029 08/06 A3011 RMK P0004,,,,2900.0,,,,,42.75,,ENE,1019.54,1019.64,,Light Rain;Fog
  strcs = strsplit(str,",")
  str=sapply(strcs, function(row) {
    paste(
      collapse=",",
      c(row[1:(nc-1)],paste(row[nc:length(row)],collapse=";"))
    )
  })

  loc=textConnection(str);
  tab=read.csv(loc,comment.char="#",stringsAsFactors=F,fill=T)

  # create a new "Date" column with POSIXct's
  # make sure new "Date" column is first
  tab=cbind(data.frame(
    Date=as.POSIXct(tz="UTC",
      gsub("T"," ",
           gsub(
             "Z","",
             tab$Date_Time
           )
           )
    )
  ),tab)

  # delete the old "Date_Time" column
  tab$Date_Time=NULL

  attr(tab,"units")=units

  tab
}

tab=read_mesonet_csv("http://api.mesowest.net/v2/stations/timeseries?token=demotoken&stid=KOAK&start=201612080000&end=201612090000&output=csv&units=english&obtimezone=UTC")

plot(tab$Date,tab$wind_speed_set_1,type="l")

print(cbind(names(tab),attr(tab,"units")))

ghost commented 7 years ago

Thanks. That works!

In addition to MesoWest, there are obviously other sites. See, for example, the report generator at https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/index.html (nice, because it also has precipitation increment precalculated).

Ram-N / weatherData

MesoWest as data source #27