I'm trying to find the historical average temperature between a range of dates using NOAA data and comparing to the long term average temperatures.
I'm using the rnoaa package and have hit a bit of a snag. For long term averages, I have been successful using the following syntax:
library('rnoaa')
start_date = "2010-01-15"
end_date = "2010-11-14"
station_id = "USW00093738"
weather_data <- ncdc(datasetid='NORMAL_DLY', stationid=paste0('GHCND:',station_id),
datatypeid='dly-tavg-normal',
startdate = start_date, enddate = end_date,limit=365)
This lets me parse weather_data$data for the long term average temperatures for that given station between January 15th and November 14th.
However, I can't seem to find the right dataset or datatype for historical average temperatures. I'd like to get the same data as the code above except with the actual daily average temperatures for those days. Any idea how to query this? I've been at it for a few hours and have had no luck.
Something I tried was the following:
weather_data <- ncdc(datasetid='GHCND', stationid=paste0('GHCND:',station_id),
startdate = start_date, enddate = end_date,limit=365)
uniq_d_types = unique(weather_data$data$datatype)
View(uniq_d_types)
This let me see the unique data types in the GHCND dataset but none of the data types seemed to be daily average temperatures. Any thoughts?
The answer is to grab historical (meaning actual, on the day specified-- not long term average) weather data from the NOAA's ISD database. USAF and WBAN values can be found by looking through the isd-history.csv file found here:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa
Here's an example query.
out <- isd(usaf='724030', wban = '93738', year=2018)
This will grab a years worth of ~hourly weather data from ISD mapping. You can then parse/process this data however you see fit (e.g. for daily average temperatures like I did).