The solar irradiance incident outside the earth’s atmosphere is called the extraterrestial or extra-atmospheric irradiance. It is derived from the solar constant only with geometric equations. It can be easily calculated with the calcSol function of the solaR package. With this post I will show an example with some packages from the Spatial task view. 
What are the alpha shapes?: “The concept of alpha shapes formalizes the intuitive notion of “shape” for spatial point set data, which occurs frequently in the computational sciences. An alpha shape is a concrete geometric object that is uniquely defined for a particular point set. Alpha shapes are generalizations of the convex hull. Given a 
The Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) at NASA Langley Research Center offers several data sources. For example, it is possible to download a text file with the 22-year (July 1983 – June 2005) monthly and annual average of global horizontal irradiation. nasafile <- 'http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/sse/global/text/global_radiation' nasa <- read.table(file=nasafile, skip=13, header=TRUE) With this data, R and the 
A violin plot is a combination of a boxplot and a kernel density plot. Lattice includes the panel.violin function for this graphical tool. This example draws a violin and a boxplot together. First, let’s download some solar radiation data from the NASA webpage: nasafile <- 'http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/sse/global/text/global_radiation' nasa <- read.table(file=nasafile, skip=13, header=TRUE) Now, I plot a 
The version 0.22 of solaR includes a new method, mergesolaR. It is designed to merge daily time series of several solaR objects. For example, we can obtain the daily irradiation of the whole set of meteorological stations of Madrid (Spain) and use this information to calculate the productivity of a grid connected PV system. It 
The version 0.22 of solaR is now available at CRAN. Besides, solaR is now registered at R-Forge. A new mergesolaR method has been defined for merging solaR objects. The calculation of the sunset time has been improved. The voltage dependency of the efficiency curve of the inverter is now included in fProd and calcGCPV. The 
In lattice, there is a function called splom for the display of scatter plot matrices. For large datasets, the panel.hexbinplot from the hexbin package is a better option than the default panel. As an example, let’s use some meteorological data from MAPA-SIAR: library(solaR) library(hexbin) aranjuez <- readMAPA(prov=28, est=3, start='01/01/2004', end='31/12/2010') aranjuezDF <- subset(as.data.frame(getData(aranjuez)), select=c('TempMedia', 'TempMax', 
Gapminder is an independent foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden. Its mission is “to debunk devastating myths about the world by offering free access to a fact-based world view“. They provide free online tools, data (more than 400 datasets freely available!) and videos “to better understand the changing world“. The initial development of Gapminder was the 
If you use lattice with R, and you need to plot confidence limits in your graphic, then panel.smoother and panel.quantile from latticeExtra will help you with this task. These functions internally calculate the error bounds and use panel.polygon from lattice. If you need to plot your own confidence limits, then you have to define a 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
