RainEA {UKFE}

Get Environment Agency rainfall data (England).

Description

Extract rainfall data from the Environment Agency's API.

Usage

RainEA(
  Lat = 54,
  Lon = -2,
  Range = 10,
  WISKI_ID = NULL,
  Period = 0.25,
  DateSt = "2015-12-01",
  DateEnd = "2015-12-31"
)

Arguments

Lat

Latitude of the point of interest. Provided when the user wants information about available local rain gauges

Lon

Longitude of the point of interest. Provided when the user wants information about available local rain gauges

Range

The radius (km) from the point of interest (Lat, Lon) for which the user wants rain gauge information.

WISKI_ID

The WISKI identification (as "character") for the rain gauge of interest

Period

The sampling rate of the rainfall in hours (generally 0.25 or 24. Default is 0.25 (15 minutes).

DateSt

The start date of the data extraction in the form of "YYYY-MM-DD".

DateEnd

The end date of the data extraction in the form of "YYYY-MM-DD".

Details

The function provides one of two outputs. Either information about available local rain gauges, or the data from a specified gauge (specified by WISKI ID). The process is to find the local information (including WISKI ID) by using the latitude and longitude and range. Then use the WISKI ID to get the data. If data requested is not available, for example - outside the date range or not available at the requested sampling rate, an error message is returned stating "no lines available in input". There is currently a limit to how many lines of data can be extracted (100,000) for each use. That is approximately 274 years of daily rainfall, but only 2.85 years of 15 minute data.

Value

A data.frame with POSIXct (DateTime) in the first column, and rainfall (mm) in the second column. Unless the WISKI_ID is null, then information about rain gauges approximately within a radius (Range) of the Lat and Lon is povided.

Author(s)

Anthony Hammond

Examples

#Get information about available rain gauges.
#within a 10km radius of Lat = 54.5, Lon = -3.2
## Not run:  RainEA(Lat = 54.5, Lon = -3.2) 
#Now we'll use the WISKI reference for the Honister rain gauge
# to get some data for the Dec 2015 (default dates)
## Not run:  Honister15 <- RainEA(WISKI_ID = "592463") 
#Now we'll have a look at the top of the data and plot it
## Not run:  head(Honister15) 
## Not run:  plot(Honister15, type = "h", ylab = "Rainfall (mm)") 
#Now we'll get the daily rain for the same period and plot it
## Not run:  Honister24 <- RainEA(WISKI_ID = "592463", Period = 24) 
## Not run:  plot(Honister24, type = "h", ylab = "Rainfall (mm)")