This package has been a long time in the making. In the end it’s more of a data package than a functional package, but pulling all the pieces together required me to learn some really cool packages: raster ( which I already knew ) rgdal and RCurl. I’ll provide a littel bit of an overview 
As noted here there is a new paper linking Forbush events with changes in DTR. Simply, during a Forbush event cosmic rays are modulated ( the flux reaching the earth decreases. The theory goes something like this. If GCRs play a role in cloud formation, then when they decrease you should be able to detect an 
Well, version 2.0 is in the can and I’ll be uploading to CRAN over the next couple of days. Lets go over the highlights. Prior to version 2.0 we had basically 3 kinds of data flowing around the package: V3 14 column format, zoo objects and mts objects. The 14 column format has always been 
A reader asked a question about data from environment canada. He wanted to know if that data could somehow be integrated into the RGhcnV3 package. That turned out to be a bit more challenging that I expected. In short order I’d found a couple other people who had done something similar. DrJ of course was 
As many have noted CRU have posted their data a bit ago and the usual gang has started to put it through the various “engines” for calculating a global temperature index. Thanks to others who worked this problem ahead of me getting the data in Rghcnv3 was not that hard, but it was not without 
I’ve spent some time forking myself. Over the past few days when I could steal away an hour here or there I decided to make a big change to the package. But it’s a good change. First some book-keeping. The Romantest.R file has a minor bug in it. Not really a bug, I just pulled 
Fast on the heels of getting RomanM’s code up and running in RghcnV3, Nick Stokes whipped out a version of his approach which he covered on his blog here: We exchanged code and few mails thrashing through details and I’m now in a position to start the integration work of his approach into Rghcnv3. In 
I’ve succeeded in getting a version of RomanM and JeffId’s Thermal hammer working with version 1.3 of RghcnV3. This is going to be a long post because there is a lot of ground to cover. First, some errata, the “Globe” demo in V1.3 appears to have a missing line, looks like an editor bug, so 
Whew, For a few hours last night I struggled with a bug, err several bugs. In the end some of the bugs were mine, some of them were “upstream” and some of them were far “upstream”. Image bugs in R 2.13.1. But the math bugs ( or flat out errors on my part) have all 
Tamino over at Open Mind has a new post detailing his approach for calculating temperature averages. See his post here. His method is based on the Berkeley method as he notes and he uses it primarily for calculating regional or local temperature averages. Read his post for the math details behind the approach. I got 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
