CHCD is an R package to allow easy access to Canadian Historical
Climate Data. The most recent version is CHCD 1.0, released on 17th
July 2025. 

# Installation

Install via CRAN with: `install.packages("chcd")`

# Usage

The core function of CHCD is to download historical climate data for
Canada. As such, likely the function you will use most often is
`chcd::get_climatedata()`.

First you will need to load the CHCD package: `library(chcd)`

## get_climatedata()

At its most simple you can access historical climate data for a
location by calling `chcd::get_climatedata()` with parameters for
location, year, and format. 

For instance, in order to access daily weather data for Vancouver in
2006 you would call `chcd::get_climatedata("vancouver", 2006,
"d")`. You will get back a single tibble that collects raw daily
weather data for all weather stations with vancouver in the name that
were reporting data in 2006. 

The place parameter can be a string or a climate station ID in order
to target a specific station. Either can be a single variable or a
list. See `chcd::get_station()` to access climate station IDs.

The date parameter must be a year or a list of years.

The interval parameter defines the interval that data should be
returned for. This can be one of: daily (d), monthly (m) or yearly
(y). Monthly and yearly return summary information for those
intervals.

Currently location searching is rather crude, and it will simply
search for the string as-is within the names of the weather stations
(case insensitive). Potentially this may mean missing stations that do
not use, for instance, "vancouver" in the name but would be useful to
your project. Future releases will include more advanced search
functionality. In order to manually review the list of stations
returned you may want to explore `chcd::get_station()`.

## get_station()

`chcd::get_station()` allows for querying the list of weather stations
available. By searching for a specific string, all weather stations
that include that string within the name will be returned along with
detailed station information. For example, the command
`chcd::get_station("squamish")` will return a tibble containing
information such as latitude and longitude, years of operation, and
province for all stations that include the term "squamish" in their
name.