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Search for weather stations

Source: R/stations.R
noaa_stations.Rd

Searches the GHCN-Daily station inventory by bounding box or text query. The station list (~130,000 stations worldwide) is downloaded once and cached locally.

Usage

noaa_stations(
  bbox = NULL,
  text = NULL,
  element = NULL,
  active_since = NULL,
  regex = FALSE,
  limit = 25L,
  cache = TRUE,
  refresh = FALSE
)

Arguments

bbox

Optional numeric vector of length 4 defining a bounding box: c(south_lat, west_lon, north_lat, east_lon).

text

Optional character string to search station names (case-insensitive). Matched literally unless regex = TRUE.

element

Optional character vector of element codes (e.g. "TMAX"). Only stations reporting all of them are returned.

active_since

Optional integer year. Only stations whose record extends to that year or later are returned. When element is also given, the test applies to those elements.

regex

Logical. Treat text as a regular expression rather than a literal string (default FALSE).

limit

Integer. Maximum number of results (default 25). Use Inf for no limit.

cache

Logical. Use cached station list if available (default TRUE).

refresh

Logical. Ignore any cached copy and refetch (default FALSE).

Value

A data frame with columns:

station

Character. Station identifier.

name

Character. Station name.

latitude

Numeric. Latitude in decimal degrees.

longitude

Numeric. Longitude in decimal degrees.

elevation

Numeric. Elevation in metres, or NA where GHCN-Daily records none.

state

Character. US state or Canadian province, where applicable.

gsn_flag

Character. "GSN" for GCOS Surface Network stations.

hcn_crn_flag

Character. "HCN" or "CRN" for US Historical Climatology Network and Climate Reference Network stations.

wmo_id

Character. Five-digit WMO identifier, where assigned.

Details

Set element or active_since to restrict results to stations that actually report a given variable, or that were still reporting recently. Both draw on the GHCN-Daily element inventory, an additional file of around 36 MB that is downloaded on first use and cached thereafter.

See also

noaa_coverage() for the full element record of a station.

Other station discovery: noaa_coverage(), noaa_nearby()

Examples

# \donttest{
op <- options(readnoaa.cache_dir = tempdir())
try({
  # Search for stations in the London area
  noaa_stations(bbox = c(51.3, -0.5, 51.7, 0.3))

  # Search by name
  noaa_stations(text = "Heathrow")
})
#> ℹ Searching for stations
#> ✔ Searching for stations [171ms]
#> 
#> ℹ Searching for stations
#> ✔ Searching for stations [215ms]
#> 
#>       station latitude longitude elevation state     name gsn_flag hcn_crn_flag
#> 1 UKE00107650  51.4789    0.4489      25.0  <NA> HEATHROW     <NA>         <NA>
#> 2 UKM00003772  51.4780   -0.4610      25.3  <NA> HEATHROW     <NA>         <NA>
#>   wmo_id
#> 1   <NA>
#> 2  03772
options(op)
# }