Download daily weather data
Perhaps "coat" and "jacket" are more ambiguous in the United States than the United Kingdom. If it's cold enough to warrant it, I wear a jacket in the morning. If it isn't, I don't want to have to carry it around all day. Checking the daily weather forecast is too much work, so I just go by the current temperature in the morning, which leads to many false positives. Thomas Levine!
On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 22:51 +0000, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
2009/2/26 Thomas Levine <thomas.levine at gmail.com>:
I'm writing a program that will tell me whether I should wear a coat, so I'd like to be able to download daily weather forecasts and daily reports of recent past weather conditions. The NOAA has very promising tabular forecasts (http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=Ithaca&state=NY&site=BGM&textField1=42.4422&textField2=-76.5002&e=0&FcstType=digital), but I can't figure out how to import them. Someone must have needed to do this before. Suggestions?
You could use my geonames package that uses the GeoNames query service. There's a sample queries here: http://geonames.r-forge.r-project.org/ Easiest is probably to use GNfindNearByWeather:
> as.data.frame(GNfindNearByWeather(57,-2))
clouds weatherCondition
1 broken clouds n/a
observation windDirection ICAO
1 EGPD 262120Z 25003KT 9000 -RA BKN018 06/05 Q1012 NOSIG 250 EGPD
elevation countryCode lng temperature dewPoint windSpeed humidity
1 65 GB -2.216667 6 5 03 93
stationName datetime lat hectoPascAltimeter
1 Aberdeen / Dyce 2009-02-26 21:20:00 57.2 1012
The package is on CRAN.
There is of course an easier way to decide if you need to wear a
coat, and that is to look out the window :)
Barry
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