Programmatic interface to the 'SNOTEL' snow data (< https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snow/>). Provides easy downloads of snow data into your R work space or a local directory. Additional post-processing routines to extract snow season indexes are provided.
SnotelR is a R toolbox to facilitate easy SNOTEL data exploration and downloads through a convenient R shiny based GUI. In addition it provides a routine to extract basic snow phenology metrics.
To install the current stable release use a CRAN repository:
install.packages("snotelr")library("snotelr")
To install the development releases of the package run the following commands:
if(!require(devtools)){install.packages("devtools")}devtools::install_github("khufkens/snotelr")library("snotelr")
Vignettes are not rendered by default, if you want to include additional documentation please use:
if(!require(devtools)){install.packages("devtools")}devtools::install_github("khufkens/snotelr", build_vignettes = TRUE)library("snotelr")
Most people will prefer the GUI to explore data on the fly. To envoke the GUI use the following command:
library(snotelr)snotel_explorer()
This will start a shiny application with an R backend in your default browser. The first window will display all site locations, and allows for subsetting of the data based upon state or a bounding box. The bounding box can be selected by clicking top-left and bottom-right.
The plot data tab allows for interactive viewing of the soil water equivalent (SWE) data together with a covariate (temperature, precipitation). The SWE time series will also mark snow phenology statistics, mainly the day of:
To access the full list of SNOTEL sites and associated meta-data use the snotel.info() function.
# returns the site info as snotel_metadata.txt in the current working directorysnotel_info(path = ".") # export to data framemeta-data <- snotel_info(path = NULL) # show some lines of the data framehead(meta-data)
To query data for e.g. site 924 as shown in the image above use:
snotel_download(site_id = 924)
For in depth analysis the statistics in the GUI can be retrieved using the snotel_phenology() function
# with df a SNOTEL file or data frame in your R workspacesnotel_phenology(df)
Use the proper acknowledgements when using the downloaded data.
This project was in part supported by the National Science Foundation’s Macro-system Biology Program (award EF-1065029).