summaryStats {waterData}

Calculate summary statistics

Description

Function to calculate summary statistics for daily hydrologic time series.

Usage

summaryStats(dataset, staid = 1)

Arguments

dataset

is the data frame containing hydrologic data

staid

is used to label the output

Format

The returned matrix has the following columns, which are formatted for putting in a report or table.

Name	Type	Description
Begin	character	The beginning date of the time series
End	character	The ending date of the time series
n	character	Number of rows
NA	character	Number of missing values
Neg	character	Number of negative values
Min	character	The minimum value
Q1	character	The first quartile, 25th percentile
Med	character	The median
Mean	character	The mean
Q3	character	The third quartile, 75th percentile
Max	character	The maximum value
StdDev	character	The standard deviation
IQR	character	The interquartile range

Details

The summary statistics returned are useful for exploratory data analysis and for describing the date set.

Value

a data frame containing a number of summary statistics of the daily hydrologic data series

Note

Hydrologic data are often skewed (Helsel and Hirsch, 2002). Summary statistics help describe the degree of skewness and help to determine the degree of applicability of hypothesis tests. Some data, in particular streamflow, may need to be transformed to produce approximately normal data.

References

Helsel, D.R. and Hirsch, R. M., 2002, Statistical methods in water resources: U.S. Geolgical Survey Techniques of Water Resources Investigations, book 4, chap. A3, 522 p. (Also available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/twri/twri4a3/).

Examples

data(exampleWaterData)
summaryStats(pH05082500, staid="05082500")