parse_coastal_forecast function

Parse BOM Coastal Waters Forecast XML Files

Parse local BOM daily coastal waters forecast XML file(s) for a specified state or territory or all of Australia.

parse_coastal_forecast(state, filepath)

Arguments

• state: Required value of an Australian state or territory as full name or postal code. Fuzzy string matching via base::agrep() is done.
• filepath: A string providing the directory location of the coastal forecast file(s) to parse. See Details for more.

Returns

A data.table::data.table() of an Australia BOM Coastal Waters Forecast.

Details

Allowed state and territory postal codes, only one state per request or all using AUS.

• AUS: Australia, returns forecast for all states, NT and ACT
• ACT: Australian Capital Territory (will return NSW)
• NSW: New South Wales
• NT: Northern Territory
• QLD: Queensland
• SA: South Australia
• TAS: Tasmania
• VIC: Victoria
• WA: Western Australia

The filepath argument will only accept a directory where files are located for parsing. DO NOT supply the full path including the file name. This function will only parse the requested state or all of Australia in the same fashion as get_coastal_forecast(), provided that the files are all present in the directory.

Examples

# parse the coastal forecast for Queensland

#download to tempfile() using basename() to keep original name
utils::download.file(url = "ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/IDQ11290.xml",
              destfile = file.path(tempdir(),
              basename("ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/IDQ11290.xml")),
              mode = "wb")

parse_coastal_forecast(state = "QLD", filepath = tempdir())

References

Forecast data come from Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) Weather Data Services

http://www.bom.gov.au/catalogue/data-feeds.shtml.

Location data and other metadata come from the BOM anonymous FTP server with spatial data

ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/adfd/spatial/, specifically the DBF file portion of a shapefile,

ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/adfd/spatial/IDM00003.dbf.

See Also

get_coastal_forecast

Other BOM: find_forecast_towns(), get_ag_bulletin(), get_available_imagery(), get_available_radar(), get_coastal_forecast(), get_precis_forecast(), get_radar_imagery(), get_satellite_imagery(), parse_ag_bulletin(), parse_precis_forecast()

Other parse: parse_ag_bulletin(), parse_precis_forecast()

Author(s)

Dean Marchiori, [email protected] , and Paul Melloy, [email protected]