Statistics, Department of
The R Journal
Date of this Version
12-2016
Document Type
Article
Citation
The R Journal (December 2016) 8(2); Editor: Michael Lawrence
Abstract
The UK National River Flow Archive (NRFA) stores several types of hydrological data and metadata: daily river flow and catchment rainfall time series, gauging station and catchment information. Data are served through the NRFA webservices via experimental RESTful APIs. Obtaining NRFA data can be unwieldy due to complexities in handling HTTP GET requests and parsing responses in JSON and XML formats. The rnrfa package provides a set of functions to programmatically access, filter, and visualize NRFA data using simple R syntax. This paper describes the structure of the rnrfa package, including examples using the main functions gdf() and cmr() for flow and rainfall data, respectively. Visualization examples are also provided with a shiny web application and functions provided in the package. Although this package is regional specific, the general framework and structure could be applied to similar databases.
Included in
Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons, Programming Languages and Compilers Commons
Comments
Copyright 2016, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported