snotelr
is an R toolbox to facilitate easy SNOTEL data exploration and downloads through a convenient R shiny based GUI. In addition it provides a routine to extract basic snow phenology metrics.
You can cite this package like this “we obtained data from SNOTEL using the snotelr
R package (Hufkens 2022)”. Here is the full bibliographic reference to include in your reference list:
Hufkens, K. (2022). snotelr: a toolbox to facilitate easy SNOTEL data exploration and downloads in R. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7012728.
To install the current stable release use a CRAN repository:
install.packages("snotelr")
library("snotelr")
The use of the GUI requires the installation of additional packages, which are side loaded.
install.packages(c("DT","shinydashboard", "plotly", "leaflet"))
To install the development releases of the package run the following commands:
if(!require(remotes)){install.packages("remotes")}
remotes::install_github("bluegreen-labs/snotelr")
library("snotelr")
Vignettes are not rendered by default, if you want to include additional documentation please use:
if(!require(remotes)){install.packages("remotes")}
remotes::install_github("bluegreen-labs/snotelr", build_vignettes = TRUE)
library("snotelr")
Most people will prefer the GUI to explore data on the fly. To envoke the GUI use the following command:
This will start a shiny application with an R backend in your default browser. The first window will display all site locations, and allows for subsetting of the data based upon state or a bounding box. The bounding box can be selected by clicking top-left and bottom-right.
The plot data tab allows for interactive viewing of the soil water equivalent (SWE) data together with a covariate (temperature, precipitation). The SWE time series will also mark snow phenology statistics, mainly the day of:
All values are provided as relative to January first of the year mentioned (spring), and absolute dates.
To access the full list of SNOTEL sites and associated meta-data use the snotel_info() function.
# returns the site info as snotel_metadata.txt in the current working directory
snotel_info(path = ".")
# export to data frame
meta-data <- snotel_info(path = NULL)
# show some lines of the data frame
head(meta-data)
To query data for e.g. site 924 as shown in the image above use:
snotel_download(site_id = 924)
For in depth analysis the statistics in the GUI can be retrieved using the snotel_phenology() function
# with df a SNOTEL file or data frame in your R workspace
snotel_phenology(df)
Hufkens, K. (2022). snotelr: a toolbox to facilitate easy SNOTEL data exploration and downloads in R. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7012728.
This project was in part supported by the National Science Foundation’s Macro-system Biology Program (award EF-1065029) and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (H2020 grant 797668). Logo design elements are taken from the FontAwesome library according to these terms, where the globe element was inverted and intersected.