search

rich-iannone / stationaRy

Get hourly meteorological data from one of thousands of global stations
http://rich-iannone.github.io/stationaRy/
Other
250 stars 32 forks source link

`Return` section in documentation #7

Closed nutterb closed 9 years ago

nutterb commented 9 years ago

It would be nice if the documentation of get_isd_station_data had a description of what the vectors in the resulting data frame represent. I may not be very good at troubleshooting some of the problems I find, but if it's okay with you, I can at least make some contribution in writing out some of this documentation.

For reference, the appropriate source information on this is, I believe, http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ish/ish-format-document.pdf

rich-iannone commented 9 years ago

Yes, that was definitely lacking but I would certainly appreciate your help with that documentation!

nutterb commented 9 years ago

Great! I always feel bad when I find problems that I have no idea how to fix. I'm glad there's something I can do to help.

nutterb commented 9 years ago

In get_isd_stations, I'm not really sure what the difference between country and country_code is. And I couldn't find a document like the one in my initial comment to describe the station data. So most of the documentation on that function is guess work on my part.

The most suspect fields are country, country_code, gn_gmtoffset, and raw_offset.

In get_isd_station_data, min and minute seem like they might be duplicates. Otherwise, those descriptions are adaptations from the source document.

rich-iannone commented 9 years ago

country is from the original stations info file obtained from NCEI. Those other objects are from a GeoNames data collection script I used to get time zone GMT offsets based on lat/lon values. I wanted to know if the country differed between the two data sources. I'm going to clean this up and include the country name, the 2-letter country code, and drop the raw offset value. I'll rename the remaining objects to be more succinct/descriptive.

By the way, thanks for the great work in that PR!