Get Long-Term Climate Data from KNMI Climate Explorer

You can query global climate data from the KNMI Climate Explorer (the KNMI is the Royal Netherlands Metereological Institute) with R.


Here's a little example how I retreived data for my hometown Innsbruck, Austria and plotted annual total precipitation. You can choose station data by pointing at a map, by setting coordinates, etc.

# get climate (precipitation) data from url:
# http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectstation.cgi?id=someone@somewhere

# station INNSBRUCK, FLUGHAFEN (11120), 47.27N, 11.35E:
ibk_dat <- read.table("http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/pa11120.dat", sep = "", 
                      row.names = 1, col.names = 0:12)

# cut off first and last yr, due to missing data..
ibk_dat <- ibk_dat[c(-1, -50,]

# plot yearly sums:
windows(width = 15, height = 5)
plot(rowSums(ibk_dat), type = "s", ylab = "Annual Total Precipitation (mm)", 
     xlab = NA, col = "blue", xaxt = "n", lwd = 1.5, las = 2, cex.axis = 0.8,
     main = "INNSBRUCK FLUGHAFEN, 47.27N, 11.35E, 593m, WMO station code: 11120") 
axis(1, labels = rownames(ibk_dat), at = 1:nrow(ibk_dat), las = 2, cex.axis = 0.85)

abline(h = mean(rowSums(ibk_dat)), col = 1, lty = 2, lwd = 1.2)
text(1250, adj = 0, "Long-term average", cex = 0.75)
arrows(x0 = 2.5, y0 = 1220,
       x1 = 2.5, y1 = 930, length = 0.05)  

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