Overview

The handling and use of public sector data and information is standardised across Europe (public sector information; PSI). The aim is to make public sector data more easily accessible to achieve greater economic and social benefits.

Since 2021 GeoSphere Austria, Austria’s federal agency for geology, geophysics, climatology and meteorology, started granting access via their data hub API. In early 2024 the API does not only allow to access station data (high quality in-situ measurements from weather stations) but also spatial data including high-resolution near-real time analysis, spatial climatologies, but also high-resolution weather forecasts.

The gsdata package (GeoSphere data) provides an easy to use interface to request and process these data sets. In version 0.0.8 only station data can be processed, but functionality for gridded data (spatial data) will be added soon.

More detailed overviews and examples are provided in the online documentation of the gsdata package:

• Datasets
• Metadata
• Stationdata
• Changelog

Installation

The stable release of gsdata is hosted on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and can be installed via

install.packages("gsdata")

Note that it depends on sf, thus additional installation of GDAL, GEOS, PROJ and sqlite3 might be needed (see sf system requirements). The development version of gsdata is hosted on github from where the current development version can be installed using

library("remotes")
install_github("retostauffer/gsdata")

Available data sets

The function gs_datasets() retrieves information about all available data sets. By default type = "station", mode = NULL is used, thus only returning information about station data datasets. This can be changed if needed (see ?gs_dataset, or in the online documentation).

library("gsdata")
ds <- gs_datasets()
head(ds, n = 3)

##      type       mode   resource_id data_format response_formats
## 1 station historical histalp-v1-1y     station      geojson|csv
## 2 station historical   klima-v1-1d     station      geojson|csv
## 3 station historical   klima-v1-1h     station      geojson|csv
##                                                                        url
## 1 https://dataset.api.hub.geosphere.at/v1/station/historical/histalp-v1-1y
## 2   https://dataset.api.hub.geosphere.at/v1/station/historical/klima-v1-1d
## 3   https://dataset.api.hub.geosphere.at/v1/station/historical/klima-v1-1h

ds <- gs_datasets(type = "grid", mode = "historical")
head(ds, n = 3)

##   type       mode             resource_id data_format response_formats
## 1 grid historical apolis_short-v1-1d-100m        grid   geojson|netcdf
## 2 grid historical       apolis-v2-1d-100m        grid   geojson|netcdf
## 3 grid historical          inca-v1-1h-1km        grid   geojson|netcdf
##                                                                               url
## 1 https://dataset.api.hub.geosphere.at/v1/grid/historical/apolis_short-v1-1d-100m
## 2       https://dataset.api.hub.geosphere.at/v1/grid/historical/apolis-v2-1d-100m
## 3          https://dataset.api.hub.geosphere.at/v1/grid/historical/inca-v1-1h-1km

Metadata

Function gs_metadata() allows to retrieve meta information about a specific data set.

meta <- gs_metadata(type = "station", mode = "historical",
                    resource_id = "tawes-v1-10min", expert = TRUE)
names(meta)

##  [1] "title"            "parameters"       "frequency"        "type"            
##  [5] "mode"             "response_formats" "start_time"       "end_time"        
##  [9] "stations"         "id_type"

The return differs for different types of data. If type = "station" the return of gs_metadata() contains e.g., information about the time period data is available ($start_time, $end_time) but also a data.frame with all available parameters ($parameters; not all parameters are available for all stations).

# parameters: data.frame with name, description and unit (DE)
head(meta$parameters, n = 2)

##   name                   long_name
## 1   DD                Windrichtung
## 2  DDX Windrichtung der Windspitze
##                                                 desc unit
## 1                Windrichtung der letzten 10 Minuten    °
## 2 Windrichtung der Windspitze der letzetn 10 Minuten    °

In addition a list of available stations is returned ($stations) which contains the station identifier (id) required to request data via the API.

# stations: a simple feature (sf) data.frame
subset(meta$stations, grepl("INNSBRUCK", name))

## Simple feature collection with 8 features and 10 fields
## Geometry type: POINT
## Dimension:     XY
## Bounding box:  xmin: 11.35667 ymin: 47.26 xmax: 11.44639 ymax: 47.3
## Geodetic CRS:  WGS 84
##           type      id                          name state altitude valid_from
## 85  INDIVIDUAL   11320        INNSBRUCK/UNIVERSITAET Tirol      578 2009-07-01
## 267 INDIVIDUAL   11121 INNSBRUCK-FLUGHAFEN (AUTOMAT) Tirol      578 2002-07-01
## 276 INDIVIDUAL 8989033      INNSBRUCK/HOETTINGER ALM Tirol     1566 2015-10-16
## 277 INDIVIDUAL 8989035          INNSBRUCK/HUNGERBURG Tirol      920 2015-10-16
## 278 INDIVIDUAL 8989036            INNSBRUCK/ALPENZOO Tirol      668 2015-10-16
## 279 INDIVIDUAL 8989037        INNSBRUCK/HAUPTBAHNHOF Tirol      611 2015-10-16
## 280 INDIVIDUAL 8989038    INNSBRUCK/OLYMPISCHES DORF Tirol      635 2015-10-16
## 281 INDIVIDUAL 8989034          INNSBRUCK/RASTLBODEN Tirol     1204 2015-10-16
##                valid_to has_sunshine has_global_radiation is_active
## 85  2027-09-22 08:12:00        FALSE                FALSE      TRUE
## 267 2027-09-22 08:12:00        FALSE                FALSE      TRUE
## 276 2027-09-22 08:12:00        FALSE                FALSE      TRUE
## 277 2027-09-22 08:12:00        FALSE                FALSE      TRUE
## 278 2027-09-22 08:12:00        FALSE                FALSE      TRUE
## 279 2027-09-22 08:12:00        FALSE                FALSE      TRUE
## 280 2027-09-22 08:12:00        FALSE                FALSE      TRUE
## 281 2027-09-22 08:12:00        FALSE                FALSE      TRUE
##                      geometry
## 85     POINT (11.38417 47.26)
## 267    POINT (11.35667 47.26)
## 276     POINT (11.36472 47.3)
## 277  POINT (11.3975 47.28778)
## 278  POINT (11.3975 47.28111)
## 279   POINT (11.405 47.26056)
## 280    POINT (11.44639 47.27)
## 281 POINT (11.39028 47.29528)

plot(meta$stations["altitude"], pch = 19,
     main = "\nLocation and altitude of all available stations")

This grants easy access to the data sets meta information, check for available stations and parameters as well as the id of the station which is required for accessing observational data (next chapter). Note that the station id may vary between different data sets!

Station data

Function gs_stationdata() allows to retrieve data of type "station" (measurements at station level). The following example retrieves temperature ("TL") and dew point temperature ("TP") observations for January 1, 2024 of two automated weather stations (tawes); namely station Innsbruck airport (11121) and Innsbruck University (11320).

tawes <- gs_stationdata(mode        = "historical",
                        resource_id = "tawes-v1-10min",
                        start       = Sys.Date() - 3,
                        end         = Sys.Date(),
                        parameters  = c("TL", "TP"),
                        station_ids = c(11121, 11320),
                        expert      = TRUE)
names(tawes)

## [1] "11121" "11320"

gs_stationdata() either returns a single zoo time series object (precisely an object of class c("gs_stationdata", "zoo")) if data for one single station is requested, or a list of objects for each of the stations as in the example above.

plot(tawes[["11121"]], screen = 1, col = c("red", "limegreen"), lwd = 2)

plot(tawes[["11320"]], screen = 1, col = c("red", "limegreen"), lwd = 2)