Introduction

helios is an R package to process heating and cooling degrees for the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) from various sources such as WRF and CMIP.

Citation

Zhao, M., Khan, Z., Dorheim, K., Vernon, C., (2024). helios: An R package to process heating and cooling degrees for GCAM. Journal of Open Source Software, 9(94), 6033, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.06033

Installation Guide

1. Download and install:

   • R (https://www.r-project.org/)
   • R studio (https://www.rstudio.com/)

2. Open R studio:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("JGCRI/helios")

or

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("JGCRI/helios")

Additional steps for UBUNTU from a terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libudunits2-dev libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev libmagick++-dev

Additional steps for MACOSX from a terminal

brew install pkg-config
brew install gdal

Getting Started

helios is an R package that calculates heating and cooling degrees using high temporal and spatial resolution of climate data and population data. helios currently supports WRF data and ISIMIP-CMIP data, or same format with any of them. For more details:

• GCAM-Regions Tutorial introduces how to use helios to calculate heating and cooling degree-days for 32 global regions in GCAM.
• GCAM-USA Tutorial introduces how to use helios to calculate heating and cooling degree-hours for CONUS in GCAM-USA.

Related Publications

• Khan, Z., Iyer, G., Patel, P., Kim, S., Hejazi, M., Burleyson, C. and Wise, M., 2021. Impacts of long-term temperature change and variability on electricity investments. Nature communications, 12(1), pp.1-12.

Contributing

Whether you find a typo in the documentation, find a bug, or want to develop functionality that you think will make helios more robust, you are welcome to contribute! The contributing page will walk you through processes to contribute to helios.