How to download precipitation data using rnoaa

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)}