Returns the first and last year of data for each element a station reports, taken from the GHCN-Daily element inventory. This is the authoritative answer to two questions the data functions cannot answer on their own: which variables a station actually measures, and how current its record is.
Value
A data frame with columns:
- station
Character. Station identifier.
- element
Character. Element code, e.g.
"TMAX".- first_year
Integer. First year with data.
- last_year
Integer. Most recent year with data.
- years
Integer. Length of the record in years.
Details
Currency varies widely. United States stations are typically complete to within a few days, while many international stations lag by months, and others stopped reporting years ago while remaining in the station list. Checking coverage first avoids requesting a window a station never covered and receiving an empty result.
The inventory file is around 36 MB. It is downloaded on first use and cached locally thereafter.
See also
Other station discovery:
noaa_nearby(),
noaa_stations()
Examples
# \donttest{
op <- options(readnoaa.cache_dir = tempdir())
try({
# What does Central Park record, and through when?
noaa_coverage("USW00094728", element = c("TMAX", "TMIN", "PRCP"))
})
#> station element first_year last_year years
#> 1 USW00094728 PRCP 1869 2026 158
#> 2 USW00094728 TMAX 1869 2026 158
#> 3 USW00094728 TMIN 1869 2026 158
options(op)
# }