Function to return data from the NWIS RDB 1.0 format
This function accepts a url parameter that already contains the desired NWIS site, parameter code, statistic, startdate and enddate. It is not recommended to use the RDB format for importing multi-site data.
importRDB1(obs_url, asDateTime = TRUE, convertType = TRUE, tz = "UTC")
obs_url |
character containing the url for the retrieval or a file path to the data file. |
asDateTime |
logical, if |
convertType |
logical, defaults to |
tz |
character to set timezone attribute of datetime. Default converts the datetimes to UTC (properly accounting for daylight savings times based on the data's provided tz_cd column). Recommended US values include "UTC","America/New_York","America/Chicago", "America/Denver","America/Los_Angeles", "America/Anchorage","America/Honolulu","America/Jamaica","America/Managua","America/Phoenix", and "America/Metlakatla". For a complete list, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones |
A data frame with the following columns:
Name | Type | Description |
agency_cd | character | The NWIS code for the agency reporting the data |
site_no | character | The USGS site number |
datetime | POSIXct | The date and time of the value converted to UTC (if asDateTime = TRUE ), |
character | or raw character string (if asDateTime = FALSE) | |
tz_cd | character | The time zone code for datetime |
code | character | Any codes that qualify the corresponding value |
value | numeric | The numeric value for the parameter |
tz_cd_reported | The originally reported time zone | |
Note that code and value are repeated for the parameters requested. The names are of the form XD_P_S, where X is literal, D is an option description of the parameter, P is the parameter code, and S is the statistic code (if applicable). If a date/time (dt) column contained incomplete date and times, a new column of dates and time was inserted. This could happen when older data was reported as dates, and newer data was reported as a date/time.
There are also several useful attributes attached to the data frame:
Name | Type | Description |
url | character | The url used to generate the data |
queryTime | POSIXct | The time the data was returned |
comment | character | Header comments from the RDB file |
site_id <- "02177000" startDate <- "2012-09-01" endDate <- "2012-10-01" offering <- "00003" property <- "00060" obs_url <- constructNWISURL(site_id,property, startDate,endDate,"dv",format="tsv") data <- importRDB1(obs_url) urlMultiPcodes <- constructNWISURL("04085427",c("00060","00010"), startDate,endDate,"dv",statCd=c("00003","00001"),"tsv") multiData <- importRDB1(urlMultiPcodes) unitDataURL <- constructNWISURL(site_id,property, "2020-10-30","2020-11-01","uv",format="tsv") #includes timezone switch unitData <- importRDB1(unitDataURL, asDateTime=TRUE) qwURL <- constructNWISURL(c('04024430','04024000'), c('34247','30234','32104','34220'), "2010-11-03","","qw",format="rdb") qwData <- importRDB1(qwURL, asDateTime=TRUE, tz="America/Chicago") iceSite <- '04024000' start <- "2015-11-09" end <- "2015-11-24" urlIce <- constructNWISURL(iceSite,"00060",start, end,"uv",format="tsv") ice <- importRDB1(urlIce, asDateTime=TRUE) iceNoConvert <- importRDB1(urlIce, convertType=FALSE) # User file: filePath <- system.file("extdata", package="dataRetrieval") fileName <- "RDB1Example.txt" fullPath <- file.path(filePath, fileName) importUserRDB <- importRDB1(fullPath)
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