Keywords: Weather, Data, Climate, Germany, FTP
Webpages:
https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rdwd,
https://github.com/brry/rdwd#rdwd Since
2014, the German weather service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) has released over 25’000 observational weather records from stations across Germany. Along with several derived and gridded datasets, they are available free of charge on the
Climate Data Center FTP server.
This vast amount of data can be hard to systematically search and inspect. The
R package
rdwd provides infrastructure to select and download/process data. For
data selection, a list of stations and files is provided along with an
interactive map and a convenient query function called selectDWD. Vectorized
data downloading and reading is made easy through dataDWD and readDWD, including the option to resume aborted downloads, correctly read the (differently structured) fixed width column files and convert time stamps to time/date columns.
The purpose of
rdwd is to facilitate usage and analysis of weather data in Germany. The targeted user group contains many scientists who may not be very familiar with
R. Therefore an emphasis was put on clear vignettes and an instructive github readme file.
rdwd was first released in January 2017 and with some additional features, it is now ready for broader advertisement.
