ecWx: Download Historical Weather Data from Environment Canada

ecWx is an R package that allows users to download historical climate data from Environment Canada. It provides functions for accessing station metadata and downloading hourly, daily, and monthly climate data for specified date ranges.

Installation

You can install the ecWx package in R from GitHub using devtools:

# Install devtools if you haven't already
install.packages("devtools")

# Install ecWx from GitHub
devtools::install_github("c-ln/ecWx")

Functions

getstations()

This function allows you to download station inventory data from Environment Canada's climate station database. The station inventory can be optionally filtered by province, station name, or climate ID. If filters are not specified, all stations are returned. This function can be used to select stations for analysis and to determine a station ID, which is required for the ecccdownload() function.

Arguments:

• province: Optional. The province of interest.
• name: Optional. The station name (or partial name).
• climateid: Optional. The climate ID of the station.
• stationid: Optional. The specific station ID.
• timeframe: Optional. The desired timeframe (e.g., "hourly", "daily", "monthly").
• year: Optional. Filter stations based on the availability of data for a specific year.

Example usage:

# get all stations
allstations <- getstations()

# get stations in Ontario with daily data available for 2020
Ontariostations <- getstations(province = "Ontario", timeframe = "daily", year = "2020) 

ecccdownload()

This function allows you to download historical weather data from Environment Canada based on a station ID and date range you specify. The function supports hourly, daily, and monthly data handling.

Arguments:

• stationid: The station ID for data being requested (format: 4-digit numeric format).
• startdate: The start date of the data you wish to download (format: "YYYY-MM-DD").
• enddate: The end date of the data you wish to download (format: "YYYY-MM-DD").
• timeframe: The desired time frame for the data (format: 1 = hourly, 2 = daily, 3 = monthly).

Example Usage:

# get daily data for ROSEVILLE climate station for 2015
data <- ecccdownload(stationid = "4816", startdate = "2015-01-01", enddate = "2015-12-31", timeframe = 2)