SnotelR is a 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 quick install the package by installing the following dependencies
install.packages("devtools")and downloading the package from the github repository
library(devtools)
install_github("khufkens/snotelr")Most people will prefer the GUI to explore data on the fly. To envoke the GUI use the following command:
library(snotelr)
snotel.explorer()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:
- first snow melt
- a continuous snow free season (last snow melt)
- first snow accumulation (first snow deposited)
- continuous snow accumulation (permanent snow cover)
- maximum SWE (and it's amount)
For in depth analysis the above statistics can be retrieved using the snow.phenology() function
# with df a SNOTEL file or data frame in your R workspace
snow.phenology(df)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
data = snotel.info(path = NULL) To query data for e.g. site 924 as shown in the image above use:
download.snotel(site = 924)Use the proper acknowledgements when using the downloaded data.
This project was in part supported by the National Science Foundation’s Macro-system Biology Program (award EF-1065029).