Create moving-periods in a dataframe and calculate things (R studio) - r

Question

I have a dataframe with Precipitation data for every day from January 1961 to December 2017 that looks like this:
DF=data.frame(Years,Month,Day,Precipitation Value)
I want to create periods of 30 days starting with 1th of January of 1961 so the first period will be 1st january to 30th January 1961 and want R to calculate the number of days without rain (Precipitation Value=0). Then, I want to do the same with the next day: 2th January so the period will be 2nd january-31st January, etc. After that, I need R to create a data frame with all the results for the year 1961. So it should be a data frame with of only one column with values (those values will be the number of days without rain in every period).
Then I need to do the same thing with all the years. Which means I will end up with 56 dataframes (1 for each year) and after that I could make a matrix with all of them (putting each data frame as a row).
The thing is I DO NOT KNOW how to start. I have no idea about how making the loop. I know it should be really easy, but I am having trouble with doing it. Specially i do not know how to tell R to stop every different year and start over and make a NEW data frame/vector with values.

Answer 1

Please provide a reproducible subset of your data so others can help you more effectively. While I cannot teach you how to create a loop from scratch here is some code that I think will help. This code simply calculates the moving 30 day average of precipitation using a simple for loop. You can use dplyr to filter these moving averages by year and create data frames doing that. Note I'm not counting the number of no precipitation days here but you can modify the loop easily to do that if needed
df<-data.frame(year = rep(1967:2002, each =12*30),
month = rep(rep(1:12, each = 30), 36),
day = rep(seq(1,30, by = 1), 432),
precipitation = sample(1:2000, 12*36))
df
#create a column that goes from 1 to however long your dataframe is
df$marker <- 1:nrow(df)
#'Now we create a simple loop to calculate the mean precipitation for
#'every 30 day window. You can modify this to count the number of days with
#'0 precipitation
#'the new column moving precip will tell you the mean precipitation for the
#' past 30 days relative to its postion. So if your on row 55, it will give
#' you the mean precipitation from row 25 to 55
df$movingprecip<-NA
for(i in 1:nrow(df)){
start = i #this says we start at i
end = i + 30 #we end 30 days later from i
if(end > nrow(df)){
#here I tell R to print this if there is not enough days
#in the dataset (30 days) to calculate the 30 day window mean
#this happens at the beginning of the dataset because we need to get to the
#30th row to start calculating means
print("not able to calculate, not 30 days into the data yet")
}else{
#Here I calculate the mean the of the past 30 days of precip
df$movingprecip[end] = mean(df[start:end,4])}
}