NOAA_allStations function

Get list of weather stations from NOAA

Download the list of all available weather stations from NOAA, or only those for a specific country and period

NOAA_allStations(force_retrieve = FALSE)

NOAA_countryStations(fips, from = NULL, to = NULL)

Arguments

• force_retrieve: If TRUE download the list again from NOAA (even if it was already downloaded previously). Defaults to FALSE, so that download happens only once per session.
• fips: 2-letter country FIPS ID (full list of codes at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/country-list.txt).
• from: Lower limit of reporting period (as class Date). Only retrieve stations whose period of record ends at or after this date.
• to: Upper limit of reporting period (as class Date). Only retrieve stations whose period of record begins at or before this date.

Returns

A data.frame with the following columns (copy-pasted from NOAA):

• usaf: Air Force station ID. May contain a letter in the first position.
• wban: NCDC WBAN number
• ctry: FIPS country ID
• st: State for US stations
• icao: ICAO ID
• lat: Latitude in thousandths of decimal degrees
• lon: Longitude in thousandths of decimal degrees
• elev.m.: Elevation in meters
• begin: Beginning Period Of Record. There may be reporting gaps within the P.O.R.
• end: Ending Period Of Record. There may be reporting gaps within the P.O.R.

Note that columns begin and end in the output are of class Date.

Details

NOAA_allStations() downloads the list of all available weather stations from NOAA, found in ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa/isd-history.csv, and returns it as a data.frame. The data are downloaded only once per R session, the first time this function is used, and are then stored internally for further retrievals.

NOAA_countryStations() retrieves the list for a specific country only (or several countries, if length(ctry)>1), and possibly only for a specific period of record.