How to download precipitation data using rnoaa - r

Question

I am new to the 'rnoaa' R package. I am wondering how do I find stationsid names to identify stations. I am interested in downloading hourly or daily precipitation data from 2011 to 2020 from the Prince William Sound Alaska area. I looked here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search but it seems to have data only up to 2014. Could someone give me a hint on what rnoaa function to use to download the desired rainfall data?
I read that the following rnoaa function:
cpc_prcp(date = "1998-04-23", drop_undefined = TRUE)
However, I don't know what to include inside the function to get the data that I am looking for and also the range of dates (2011 to 2020)

Answer 1

You could try this workflow:
An internet search gives the latitude and longitude for Prince William Sound Alaska area.
library(rnoaa)
# create a data frame for Prince William latitude and longitude
lat_lon_df <- data.frame(id = "pw",
lat = 60.690545,
lon = -147.097055)
# find 10 closest monitors to Prince William
mon_near_pw <-
meteo_nearby_stations(
lat_lon_df = lat_lon_df,
lat_colname = "lat",
lon_colname = "lon",
var = "PRCP",
year_min = 2011,
year_max = 2020,
limit = 10,
)
mon_near_pw
#> $pw
#> # A tibble: 10 x 5
#> id name latitude longitude distance
#> <chr> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 USC00501240 CANNERY CREEK 61.0 -148. 42.9
#> 2 USC00509747 WALLY NOERENBERG HATCHERY 60.8 -148. 55.1
#> 3 USS0048L06S Esther Island 60.8 -148. 55.3
#> 4 USC00505604 MAIN BAY 60.5 -148. 57.6
#> 5 USS0046M04S Sugarloaf Mtn 61.1 -146. 61.1
#> 6 USC00509687 VALDEZ 61.1 -146. 62.4
#> 7 USW00026442 VALDEZ WSO 61.1 -146. 63.4
#> 8 US1AKVC0005 VALDEZ 3.6 ENE 61.1 -146. 66.3
#> 9 USC00509685 VALDEZ AIRPORT 61.1 -146. 67.3
#> 10 USC00502179 CORDOVA WWTP 60.5 -146. 74.0
# extract precipitation data for the first location
pw_prcp_dat <-
meteo_pull_monitors(
monitors = mon_near_pw$pw$id[1],
date_min = "2011-01-01",
date_max = "2020-12-31",
var = "PRCP"
)
head(pw_prcp_dat)
#> # A tibble: 6 x 3
#> id date prcp
#> <chr> <date> <dbl>
#> 1 USC00501240 2011-01-01 704
#> 2 USC00501240 2011-01-02 742
#> 3 USC00501240 2011-01-03 211
#> 4 USC00501240 2011-01-04 307
#> 5 USC00501240 2011-01-05 104
#> 6 USC00501240 2011-01-06 0
# out of curiosity have plotted monthly summary of precipitation.
# For metadata see: https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/readme.txt
# PRCP = Precipitation (tenths of mm)
library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)
library(ggplot2)
pw_prcp_dat %>%
mutate(year = year(date),
month = month(date)) %>%
group_by(year, month) %>%
summarise(prcp = sum(prcp, na.rm = TRUE) / 10) %>%
ggplot(aes(factor(month), prcp))+
geom_col()+
facet_wrap(~year)+
labs(y = "Precipitation [mm]",
x = "Month")+
theme_bw()
Created on 2021-08-22 by the reprex package (v2.0.0)