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AWAPer - an R-package for catchment-weighted climate data anywhere in Australia

Getting rainfall and evaporation time-series data is an essential first step for many hydrological studies. Too often this requires the tedious task of finding a weather station that is sufficiently close to the study catchment. Rarely is there a weather station inside the catchment, but even if there is then the spatial variability of rainfall and evaporation throughout the catchment must be ignores - and errors introduced (see example here). AWAPer eliminates these challenges by allowing efficient estimate of area weighted (i.e. catchment weighted) weather time-series data anywhere in Australia and at any time step.

Some of the features include:

  1. Area weighted and point precipitation, minimum and maximum temperature, vapour pressure and solar radiation anywhere in Australia at any time-step. See examples here and here.
  2. Maps of catchment weather variables over time showing the spatial variability in precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (see examples here)
  3. Ten measures of area weighted and point evapotranspiration (see examples here) using the Evaporation package, implementing McMahon et al, (2013),

The meteorological data is sourced from Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) ~5x5km gridded products (see here). The package functions by building compressed netCDF grids from the BOM data. Users generally build the netCDF grids using all historic data and then update as required (see example here).

The package development was funded by the Victorian Government The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning Climate and Water Initiate. For details of the approach see the function references or the journal paper Peterson et al. (2020).

Installation

The package will soon be submitted to the R library (i.e. CRAN). In the meantime, you can install it from github using the following R command:

remotes::install_github("peterson-tim-j/AWAPer")

Once installed, browse the package examples using the R-command:

browseVignettes("AWAPer")

Windows System Requiements

On Windows OS, the program “7z” is required to uzip the “.Z” compressed grid files.

Follow the steps below to download and install 7z.

  1. Download and intall 7z from https://www.7-zip.org/download.html
  2. Click “Search Windows”, search “Edit environmental variables for your account” and click on it.
  3. In the “User variables” window, select the “Path”, and click “Edit…”.
  4. In the “Edit environmental variable” window, click “New”.
  5. Paste the path to the 7zip application folder, and click OK.
  6. Restart Windows.
  7. Check the setup by opening the “Command Prompt” and enter the command “7z”. If 7z is correctly setup, output details such as the version, descriptions of commands, etc should be shown.’)