Download Radar Data for Biological Research

Load polar volume and vertical profile data for aeroecological research directly into R. With 'getRad' you can access data from several sources in Europe and the US and standardize it to facilitate further exploration in tools such as 'bioRad'.

getRad

getRad is an R package that provides a unified interface to download radar data for biological and aeroecological research. It gives access to both polar volume radar data and vertical profile data from different sources and loads it directly into R. getRad also facilitates further exploration of the data by other tools such as bioRad by standardizing the data.

Installation

Install the released version of getRad from CRAN:

install.packages("getRad")

Or install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("aloftdata/getRad")

Usage

Download a polar volume, and then plot it using bioRad:

library(getRad)
library(bioRad)

# Plot daytime insect movements in Finland (Mäkinen et al. 2022)
pvol <- get_pvol("fianj", as.POSIXct("2012-05-17 14:00", tz = "UTC"))
plot(project_as_ppi(get_scan(pvol, 0), range_max = 75000))

plot(calculate_vp(pvol, h_layer = 50, n_layer = 40, warning = FALSE))

# Plot nocturnal migration in Finland
pvol <- get_pvol("fianj", as.POSIXct("2012-05-11 23:00", tz = "UTC"))
plot(project_as_ppi(get_scan(pvol, 0), range_max = 75000))

plot(calculate_vp(pvol, h_layer = 50, n_layer = 40, warning = FALSE))

Download a vertical profile time series from the Aloft bucket:

# Plot VPTS data for two radars
vpts_list <- get_vpts(
  radar = c("bejab", "deess"),
  datetime = lubridate::interval(
    lubridate::as_datetime("2021-10-03 16:00:00"),
    lubridate::as_datetime("2021-10-05 10:00:00")
  ),
  source = "baltrad"
)
par(mfrow = 2:1)
for (i in names(vpts_list)) {
  plot(regularize_vpts(vpts_list[[i]]), main = i)
}

Meta

• We welcome contributions including bug reports.
• License: MIT
• Get citation information for getRad in R with citation("getRad").
• Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.