USA Drought of 2013: Analysis of High-resolution Rainfall Data Using R

The ongoing drought in California and other parts of Southwestern United States has been reported extensively by newspapers and government sites.

Although rainfall deficit is technically meteorological drought, and drought could be of several other types (such as hydrological, agricultural, etc.), the attempt here is to demonstrate the use of R in the analysis of high resolution rainfall data. Using 4-km rainfall data from the PRISM Climate Group for 1895-2013, the total for 2013 is compared with the long-term and near-term historical averages.

Spatial patterns compare well with those from the Drought Monitor from the University of Nebraska.

The entire code and all the graphics are available on GitHub - https://github.com/RationShop/rain_prism

This effort is part of The Rain Project.

Any comments or help appreciated.

The Rain Project: An R-based Open Source Analysis of Publicly Available Rainfall Data

Rainfall data used by researchers in academia and industry does not always come in the same format. Data is often in atypical formats and in extremely large number of files and there is not always guidance on how to obtain, process and visualize the data. This project attempts to resolve this issue by serving as a hub for the processing of such publicly available rainfall data using R.

The goal of this project is to reformat rainfall data from their native format to a consistent format, suitable for use in data analysis. Within this project site, each dataset is intended to have its own wiki. Eventually, an R package would be developed for each data source.

Currently R code is available to process data from three sources - Climate Prediction Center (global coverage), US Historical Climatology Network (USA coverage) and APHRODITE (Asia/Eurasia and Middle East).

The project home page is here - http://rationshop.github.io/rain_r/

If you are aware of other sources and would like to add them to this list (and/or would like to add the R code) please let me know. Any other comments or help appreciated.