The RClim Initiative

This page was created in 2005 as part of the work developed in Work Package 4.3 (Understanding extreme weather and climate events) of the FP6 EU ENSEMBLES project. This is a joint effort between the Climate Analysis Group (CAG) of the University of Reading and the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (NERSC).

Aims: Develop statistical methods and write user friendly functions in the R language for describing and exploring weather and climate extremes in gridded datasets, making efficient use of the already existing CRAN packages. These methods and functions will then be used by other ENSEMBLE partners of Work Package 4.3. The RCLIM initiative will develop functions for:

• Reading and writing netcdf gridded datasets
• Exploratory climate analysis in gridded datasets
• Climate analysis of extremes in gridded datasets
• Animating and plotting climate analysis of gridded datasets

Team: David Stephenson, Caio Coelho, Chris Ferro and Dag Johan Steinskog

RCLIM functions: Download the rclim.txt file to obtain all RCLIM developed functions. There is also a list of all functions with a short description and the source code of each function.

Sample data: Download the following files before trying the demos below.

• ERA-40 monthly mean 2 metre temperature
• CRU monthly mean surface temperature anomalies
• CRU climatological monthly mean surface temperature
• Southern Oscillation Index

Demos: After downloading the sample data files and the RCLIM functions (rclim.txt file) from the links above, open R, change directory to where you saved the sample data files and rclim.txt file, execute the command source("rclim.txt") to have all RCLIM functions loaded and try the following commands.

• Demo 1 - Rcommands2mt.txt
  
• Demo 2 - report-commands.txt (commands used to produce the figures of the deliverable report)

R web sites: Dag Johan Steinskog's R page

How to contact us: Please send us an e-mail if you have any queries, comments or suggestions for the RCLIM initiative.