My R package designed to import all of the Berkeley Earth Surface temperature data is officially on CRAN, as BerkeleyEarth.  The version there is 1.3 and I’ve completed some testing with the help of David Vavra. The result of that is version 1.5 which is available here at the drop box. ... [Read more...]

I’ve just finished and uploaded another climate data package for R. This one focuses on  CRN the climate Reference Network Here is their home page   The package for now is really simple, but all of the packages  I’m building are getting simpler. In the end ( whenever that is ) ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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, ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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, ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

I’ve just uploaded version 1.1 of  the package RghcnV3 to Cran. I’ve made a few changes that should make it easier for some folks to use. First I removed the requirement for rgdal. At the present time “rgdal” is not required. On the MAC installing it can be a ... [Read more...]

I am down to the last strokes of creating a package for downloading, importing and analyzing GHCN (Global Historical Climate Network0 Version 3.  There  were a few things holding me up, but  I’ve manged to handle all of them except the last one.  Let’s spend a little time looking ... [Read more...]

It’s been a long journey and there are some people to thank for helping me along the way. Steve McIntyre, Ron Broberg, Jeff Id, Ryan ODonnell, RomanM, Nick Stokes, Robert Hijmans, Gabor  Grothendieck, Hadley Wickham, David Winsemius, and countless others on the R Help list. The Package is done. ... [Read more...]

There are any number of short tutorials on making add on R packages on your Windows machine. This is yet another version of that process. I’ve explained what I did in 10 easy steps on the pages, but I’ll give a brief overview here. In the first step I ... [Read more...]

The Global Historical Climate Network  (GHCN) is in it’s beta stage. On of the stated goals of the project is to improve the metadata that is provided for the station data.  Over the past few months several independent volunteers have been focusing on the issue of station metadata, each ... [Read more...]

This google map display is just one of 230 GHCN stations that is located in the water. After finding  instances of this phenomena over and over, it seemed an easy thing to find and analyze all such cases in GHCN. The issue matters for a two reasons: In my temperature analysis ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

I am currently working on rectifying the GHCN station list to improve the location information. Its the kind of database work that is mind numbingly tedious and a PITA in R. not because R lacks capabilities, its just tough and not very sexy to matching and fuzzy matching and greping ... [Read more...]