Shiny App to access NOAA data

[This article was first published on R tutorial for Spatial Statistics, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Now that the US Government shutdown is over, it is time to download NOAA weather daily summaries in bulk and store them somewhere safe so that at the next shutdown we do not need to worry.

Below is the code to download data for a series of years:


NOAA_BulkDownload <- function(Year, Dir){
  URL <- paste0("ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/",Year,"/gsod_",Year,".tar")
  download.file(URL, destfile=paste0(Dir,"/gsod_",Year,".tar"),
                method="auto",mode="wb")
  
  if(dir.exists(paste0(Dir,"/NOAA Data"))==FALSE){dir.create(paste0(Dir,"/NOAA Data"))}
  
  untar(paste0(Dir,"/gsod_",Year,".tar"), 
        exdir=paste0(Dir,"/NOAA Data"))
}


An example on how to use this function is below:

Date <- 1980:2019
lapply(Date, NOAA_BulkDownload, Dir="C:/Users/fabio.veronesi/Desktop/New folder")

Theoretically, the process can be parallelized using parLappy, but I have not tested it.

Once we have all the file in one folder we can create the Shiny app to query these data.
The app will have a dashboard look with two tabs: one with a Leaflet map showing the location of the weather stations (markers are shown only at a certain zoom level to decrease loading time and RAM usage), below:




The other tab will allow the creation of the time-series (each file represents only 1 year, so we need to bind several files together to get the full period we are interested in) and it will also do some basic data cleaning, e.g. turn T from F to C, or snow depth from inches to mm. Finally, from this tab users can view the final product and download a cleaned csv.



The code for ui and server scripts is on my GitHub:
https://github.com/fveronesi/NOAA_ShinyApp

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R tutorial for Spatial Statistics.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)