loadManualBlindTimes {birdscanR}

loadManualBlindTimes

Description

Load manual blind times from csv file. For the MTR computation the times when the radar was blind have to be known. The radar itself can be blind in case of a protocol change (block time at the beginning of each protocol, usually 60s) or due to rain/snow or clutter (nearby objects, leaves or similar on radome, etc.). These times are stored in the visibility table or in the time_bins table in relation to the time bins duration (5min). To be flexible and not fixed to the 5 min time bins created by the radar, the visibility table is used in this script. In addition to the radar blind times, manual blind times can be defined. Manual blind times have to be defined in a csv file and are loaded with the function ‘loadManualBlindTimes’. A example dataset is available by running: data(manualBlindTimes) write.csv(manualBlindTimes, file = 'the output file destination', row.names = F) The file path is defined as a global variable ‘manualBlindTimesFile’. A custom file and filepath can be used instead. The manual blind times have to be entered with 3 columns: start time 'yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss', stop time 'yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss', type.

Example: 2021-01-16 04:15:00,2021-01-16 05:42:00,rain 2021-01-17 16:33:00,2021-01-17 18:04:00,clutter Manual blind time types can be chosen freely. When computing observation times, it can be decided if some of the defined manual blind time types should be treated as observed time with MTR zero or as blind time (e.g. rain). If no file is present or the file is empty, no manual blind times will be computed.

Usage

loadManualBlindTimes(filePath, blindTimesTZ, targetTZ)

Arguments

filePath

character string, absolute filepath of the manual blind time file

blindTimesTZ

time zone of the blind times

targetTZ

target time zone of the blind times

Value

A dataframe with the manual blind times

Author(s)

Fabian Hertner, [e-mail]; Birgen Haest, [e-mail]

Examples

## Not run: 
# load manual blind time example data from birdscanR package
  data(manualBlindTimes)
  
# Save example manual blind times to a file
  write.csv(manualBlindTimes, file = "manualBlindTimes.csv", row.names = F)
  
# Read the manual blind times from file
  manualBlindTimes.new = loadManualBlindTimes(filePath     = "./manualBlindTimes.csv",
                                              blindTimesTZ = "ETC/GMT", 
                                              targetTZ     = "ETC/GMT")

## End(Not run)