timavg {cmsafops}

Determine all-time average.

Description

The function determines the all-time average from data of a single CM SAF NetCDF input file and is useful to calculate climatological means. The function limits the timesteps, which are read at once, to avoid RAM overflow. There is a difference between the operators timavg and timmean. The mean is regarded as a statistical function, whereas the average is found simply by adding the sample members and dividing the result by the sample size. For example, the mean of 1, 2, miss and 3 is (1 + 2 + 3)/3 = 2, whereas the average is (1 + 2 + miss + 3)/4 = miss/4 = miss. If there are no missing values in the sample, the average and mean are identical.

Usage

timavg(
  var,
  infile,
  outfile,
  nc34 = 4,
  overwrite = FALSE,
  verbose = FALSE,
  nc = NULL
)

Arguments

var

Name of NetCDF variable (character).

infile

Filename of input NetCDF file. This may include the directory (character).

outfile

Filename of output NetCDF file. This may include the directory (character).

nc34

NetCDF version of output file. If nc34 = 3 the output file will be in NetCDFv3 format (numeric). Default output is NetCDFv4.

overwrite

logical; should existing output file be overwritten?

verbose

logical; if TRUE, progress messages are shown

nc

Alternatively to infile you can specify the input as an object of class ncdf4 (as returned from ncdf4::nc_open).

Value

A NetCDF file including the temporal average is written.

See Also

Other temporal operators: cmsaf.detrend(), cmsaf.mk.test(), cmsaf.regres(), num_above(), num_below(), num_equal(), timmax(), timmean(), timmin(), timpctl(), timsd(), timsum(), trend(), trend_advanced()

Examples

## Create an example NetCDF file with a similar structure as used by CM
## SAF. The file is created with the ncdf4 package.  Alternatively
## example data can be freely downloaded here: <https://wui.cmsaf.eu/>

library(ncdf4)

## create some (non-realistic) example data

lon <- seq(5, 15, 0.5)
lat <- seq(45, 55, 0.5)
time <- seq(as.Date("2000-01-01"), as.Date("2010-12-31"), "month")
origin <- as.Date("1983-01-01 00:00:00")
time <- as.numeric(difftime(time, origin, units = "hour"))
data <- array(250:350, dim = c(21, 21, 132))

## create example NetCDF

x <- ncdim_def(name = "lon", units = "degrees_east", vals = lon)
y <- ncdim_def(name = "lat", units = "degrees_north", vals = lat)
t <- ncdim_def(name = "time", units = "hours since 1983-01-01 00:00:00",
 vals = time, unlim = TRUE)
var1 <- ncvar_def("SIS", "W m-2", list(x, y, t), -1, prec = "short")
vars <- list(var1)
ncnew <- nc_create(file.path(tempdir(),"CMSAF_example_file.nc"), vars)
ncvar_put(ncnew, var1, data)
ncatt_put(ncnew, "lon", "standard_name", "longitude", prec = "text")
ncatt_put(ncnew, "lat", "standard_name", "latitude", prec = "text")
nc_close(ncnew)

## Determine the climatology of the example CM SAF NetCDF file and write
## the output to a new file.
timavg(var = "SIS", infile = file.path(tempdir(),"CMSAF_example_file.nc"), 
 outfile = file.path(tempdir(),"CMSAF_example_file_timavg.nc"))

unlink(c(file.path(tempdir(),"CMSAF_example_file.nc"), 
 file.path(tempdir(),"CMSAF_example_file_timavg.nc")))