noaa - Integrated Surface Database data
I’ve recently made some improvements to the functions that work with ISD (Integrated Surface Database) data. isd data The isd() function now caches more intelligently. We now cache using .rds files via saveRDS/readRDS, whereas we used to use .csv files, which take up much more disk space, and we have to worry about not changing data formats on reading data back into an R session. This has the downside that you can’t just go directly to open up a cached file in your favorite spreadsheet viewer, but you can do that manually after reading in to R. In addition, isd() now has a function cleanup, if TRUE after downloading the data file from NOAA’s ftp server and processing, we delete the file. That’s fine since we have the cached processed file. But you can choose not to cleanup the original data files. Data processing in isd() is improved as well. We convert key variables to appropriate classes to be more useful. isd stations ...