R Create function to add water year column - r

Question

I want to be able to create a water year column for a time series. The US water year is from Oct-Sept and is considered the year it ends on. For example the 2014 water year is from October 1, 2013 - September 30, 2014.
This is the US water year, but not the only water year. Therefore I want to enter in a start month and have a water year calculated for the date.
For example if my data looks like
date
2008-01-01 00:00:00
2008-02-01 00:00:00
2008-03-01 00:00:00
2008-04-01 00:00:00
.
.
.
2008-12-01 00:00:00
I want my function to work something like:
wtr_yr <- function(data, start_month) {
does stuff
}
Then my output would be
wtr_yr(data, 2)
date wtr_yr
2008-01-01 00:00:00 2008
2008-02-01 00:00:00 2009
2008-03-01 00:00:00 2009
2008-04-01 00:00:00 2009
.
.
.
2009-01-01 00:00:00 2009
2009-02-01 00:00:00 2010
2009-03-01 00:00:00 2010
2009-04-01 00:00:00 2010
I started by breaking the date up into separate columns, but I don't think that is the best way to go about it. Any advice?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

We can use POSIXlt to come up with an answer.
wtr_yr <- function(dates, start_month=9) {
# Convert dates into POSIXlt
dates.posix = as.POSIXlt(dates)
# Year offset
offset = ifelse(dates.posix$mon >= start_month - 1, 1, 0)
# Water year
adj.year = dates.posix$year + 1900 + offset
# Return the water year
adj.year
}
Let's now use this function in an example.
# Sample input vector
dates = c("2008-01-01 00:00:00",
"2008-02-01 00:00:00",
"2008-03-01 00:00:00",
"2008-04-01 00:00:00",
"2009-01-01 00:00:00",
"2009-02-01 00:00:00",
"2009-03-01 00:00:00",
"2009-04-01 00:00:00")
# Display the function output
wtr_yr(dates, 2)
# Combine the input and output vectors in a dataframe
df = data.frame(dates, wtr_yr=wtr_yr(dates, 2))

Answer 2

I had a similar problem a while back but dealing with fiscal years that started in October. I found this function which also computes the quarters within the year. For one part, I only wanted it to output the fiscal year, so I edited a tiny part of the function to do that. There is surely a much cleaner/efficient way of doing it, but this should work for smaller data sets. Here is the edited function:
getYearQuarter <- function(x,
firstMonth=7,
fy.prefix='FY',
quarter.prefix='Q',
sep='-',
level.range=c(min(x), max(x)) ) {
if(level.range[1] > min(x) | level.range[2] < max(x)) {
warning(paste0('The range of x is greater than level.range. Values ',
'outside level.range will be returned as NA.'))
}
quarterString <- function(d) {
year <- as.integer(format(d, format='%Y'))
month <- as.integer(format(d, format='%m'))
y <- ifelse(firstMonth > 1 & month >= firstMonth, year+1, year)
q <- cut( (month - firstMonth) %% 12, breaks=c(-Inf,2,5,8,Inf),
labels=paste0(quarter.prefix, 1:4))
return(paste0(fy.prefix, substring(y,3,4)))
}
vals <- quarterString(x)
levels <- unique(quarterString(seq(
as.Date(format(level.range[1], '%Y-%m-01')),
as.Date(format(level.range[2], '%Y-%m-28')), by='month')))
return(factor(vals, levels=levels, ordered=TRUE))
}
Your input vector should be type Date, and then specify the start month. Assuming you have a data frame(df) with the 'date' column as in your question, this should do the trick.
df$wtr_yr <- getYearQuarter(df$date, firstMonth=10)

Answer 3

You can also achieve adding a column by water year by using the "lfstat" package
https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/lfstat/versions/0.9.4/topics/water_year