NOAA Storms wrapper

Get NOAA IBTrack data ready to use in R.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which releases datasets known as International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship.

Installing

library(devtools)
install_github("bryceschultz/noaastorms")
library(noaastorms)
install.packages("dplyr")

Available functions

getStorms: Fetch NOAA historical best track storms data

> df <- getStorms(c('EP'))
> df2 <- getStorms(c('EP', 'SP'),
                   dateRange = c(as.Date('2010-01-01'), as.Date('2012-01-01')))

> head(df[1:5])
     Serial_Num Season Num Basin Sub_basin    Name
2 1902276N14266   1902  01    EP        MM UNNAMED
3 1902276N14266   1902  01    EP        MM UNNAMED
4 1902276N14266   1902  01    EP        MM UNNAMED
5 1902276N14266   1902  01    EP        MM UNNAMED
6 1902276N14266   1902  01    EP        MM UNNAMED

Argument: A vector of basin codes from the list:

• NA: North Atlantic
• SA: South Atlantic
• NI: North Indian
• SI: South Indian
• EP: East Pacific
• SP: South Pacific
• WP: West Pacific

Argument: A vector of two dates. Storms dated outside of this date range will be filtered out.

Usage

# install dependencies
install.packages(c("ggplot2","maps","PBSmapping","data.table","mapproj"))
library(ggplot2)
library("PBSmapping")

# load a map of the world and `clipPolys` it to avoid issues when zooming in with `coord_map`
wm <- map_data("world")
data.table::setnames(wm, c("X","Y","PID","POS","region","subregion"))
worldmap = clipPolys(wm, xlim=c(20,110),ylim=c(0, 45), keepExtra=TRUE)

# load storms
spStorms <- getStorms(c('NI','SI'))

# generate ggplot
ggplot(spStorms, aes(x = LON, y = LAT, group = SID)) + 
  geom_polygon(data = worldmap, aes(x = X, y = Y, group = PID), 
               fill = "whitesmoke", colour = "gray10", size = 0.2) +
  geom_path(alpha = 0.1, size = 0.8,
            color = "red") +
  coord_map(xlim = c(20,110), ylim = c(0, 45)) 

Notes

This package uses IBTrACS data v4.0, released from March 2019.

For a complete description of the changes in v4.0, read the official NOAA changelog.