# NCDC introduction

#### Scott Chamberlain

#### 2020-04-06

`rnoaa` is an R wrapper for many NOAA data types, including National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).

## Load rnoaa

    library('rnoaa')

## Get info on a station by specifying a datasetid, locationid, and stationid

    ncdc_stations(datasetid='GHCND', locationid='FIPS:12017', stationid='GHCND:USC00084289')

## Search for data and get a data.frame

    out <- ncdc(datasetid='NORMAL_DLY', datatypeid='dly-tmax-normal', startdate = '2010-05-01', enddate = '2010-05-10')
    out$data

Note that the `value` column has strangely large numbers for temperature measurements. By convention, `rnoaa` doesn’t do any conversion of values from the APIs and some APIs use seemingly odd units.

You have two options here:

1. Use the `add_units` parameter on `ncdc()` to have `rnoaa` attempt to look up the units. This is a good idea to try first.

2. Consult the documentation for whiechever dataset you’re accessing. In this case, `GHCND` has a README which indicates `TMAX` is measured in tenths of degrees Celcius.

### See a `data.frame` with units

As mentioned above, you can use the `add_units` parameter with `ncdc()` to ask `rnoaa` to attempt to look up units for whatever data you ask it to return. Let’s ask `rnoaa` to add units to some precipitation (PRCP) data:

    with_units <- ncdc(datasetid='GHCND', stationid='GHCND:USW00014895', datatypeid='PRCP', startdate = '2010-05-01', enddate = '2010-10-31', limit=500, add_units = TRUE)
    head( with_units$data )

From the above output, we can see that the units for `PRCP` values are “mm_tenths” which means tenths of a millimeter. You won’t always be so lucky and sometimes you will have to look up the documentation on your own.

## Plot data, super simple, but it’s a start

    out <- ncdc(datasetid='NORMAL_DLY', stationid='GHCND:USW00014895', datatypeid='dly-tmax-normal', startdate = '2010-01-01', enddate = '2010-12-10', limit = 300)
    ncdc_plot(out)

Note that `PRCP` values are in units of tenths of a millimeter, as we found out above.

## More on plotting

### Example 1

Search for data first, then plot

    out <- ncdc(datasetid='GHCND', stationid='GHCND:USW00014895', datatypeid='PRCP', startdate = '2010-05-01', enddate = '2010-10-31', limit=500)

Default plot

    ncdc_plot(out)

Create 14 day breaks

    ncdc_plot(out, breaks="14 days")

One month breaks

    ncdc_plot(out, breaks="1 month", dateformat="%d/%m")

### Example 2

Search for data

    out <- ncdc(datasetid='GHCND', stationid='GHCND:USW00014895', datatypeid='PRCP',
                startdate = '2010-05-01', enddate = '2010-10-31', limit=500)

Make a plot, with 6 hour breaks, and date format with only hour

    ncdc_plot(out, breaks = "1 month", dateformat = "%d/%m")

## Combine many calls to noaa function

Search for two sets of data

    out1 <- ncdc(datasetid='GHCND', stationid='GHCND:USW00014895', datatypeid='PRCP', startdate = '2010-03-01', enddate = '2010-05-31', limit=500)

    out2 <- ncdc(datasetid='GHCND', stationid='GHCND:USW00014895', datatypeid='PRCP', startdate = '2010-09-01', enddate = '2010-10-31', limit=500)

Then combine with a call to `ncdc_combine`

    df <- ncdc_combine(out1, out2)
    head(df[[1]]); tail(df[[1]])

Then plot - the default passing in the combined plot plots the data together. In this case it looks kind of weird since a straight line combines two distant dates.

    ncdc_plot(df)

But we can pass in each separately, which uses `facet_wrap` in `ggplot2` to plot each set of data in its own panel.

    ncdc_plot(out1, out2, breaks="45 days")