R Software

What is R?

R is a freely available powerful language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R languague has been developed by statisticians based on the S language and environment, which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. This overview of R (PDF) contains an overview of the R statistical language. Further information about R is available in the R project web site.

R also has a wide range of contributed packages developed not only by statisticians but also by other professionals of related areas (e.g. climate scientists). R is starting to be popular in climate research due to its versatility and efficiency in performing complex statistical analysis of large environmental datasets and easily mapping the results. The no need of jumping from one software to another to make statistical analysis and then mapping the results makes R very attractive and convenient for climate research.

How to get started with R

Installation: The R source code for installation in Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix platforms is available from the CRAN mirrors web page. The R manuals web page describes how to download and install the R software.

Small demo: A few R command lines to get you started are provided in this small demo (ascii)

Reference card: Some useful R commands are listed in this short reference card (pdf)