Landscape meteorology tools

Important notice

Starting on June 2023, rgdal, rgeos and maptools R packages entered a maintenance mode (meaning no new updates). Coincidentally, sp and raster packages are now superseded by the more modern alternatives sf, stars and terra. This means that the meteoland classes, which are based on sp, need to be updated to deal with these changes in the R-spatial ecosystem.

Starting with version 2.0.0 of meteoland (February 2023) all functions, methods and classes based on or using the sp, raster and rgdal package were soft-deprecated.

Since ver. 2.1.0, these functions, methods and classes have been removed from the package

See the Tidy meteoland vignette for more info about this changes.

Introduction

With the aim to assist research of climatic impacts on forests, the R package meteoland provides utilities to estimate daily weather variables at any position over complex terrains (De Cáceres et al 2018):

• Spatial interpolation of daily weather records from meteorological stations.
• Statistical correction of meteorological data series (e.g from climate models). Note that this functionality is deprecated starting in version 2.0.0.
• Multisite and multivariate stochastic weather generation. Note that this functionality is deprecated starting in version 2.0.0.

Package installation and documentation

Package meteoland can be found at CRAN, but the version in this repository may not be the most recent one. Latest stable versions can be downloaded and installed from GitHub as follows (package remotes should be installed first):

1remotes::install_github("emf-creaf/meteoland")

Detailed documentation regarding meteoland calculation routines can be found at (https://emf-creaf.github.io/meteolandbook/index.html).

Companion packages

Package meteospain

During the development of meteoland some functions to download weather station data from several Spanish networks were originally developed. After meteoland version 1.0.1, the user is recommended to use package meteospain, which can also be found at CRAN. Functions to download weather station data are still available in meteoland but they have been deprecated and make internal calls to functions in package meteospain.

Packages medfate and medfateland

Package meteoland has been designed to provide input weather data for simulations of forest function and dynamics via the following packages

• Package medfate provides functions for simulating forest function and dynamics.
• Package medfateland extends medfate by allowing simulations to be performed in a spatially explicit context.

Authorship

R package meteoland is developed and maintained by the Ecosystem Modelling Facility at CREAF (Catalonia, Spain).

References

• De Caceres M, Martin-StPaul N, Turco M, Cabon A, Granda V (2018) Estimating daily meteorological data and downscaling climate models over landscapes. Environmental Modelling and Software 108: 186-196. (doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2018.08.003).