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Finding NOAA stations

Source: vignettes/noaa.qmd

Introduction

Meteorological inputs—temperature, precipitation, and barometric pressure—are essential for computing dissolved oxygen saturation and gas exchange in stream metabolism models. This vignette shows how to find NOAA daily-summary stations near Kings Creek at Konza Prairie Biological Station, Kansas, and download the weather data needed to accompany the built-in kings_discharge dataset (water year 2025: 2024-10-01 through 2025-09-30).

preMetabolizer provides three helpers for station discovery:

  • get_noaa_stations() searches for GHCND stations via the NCEI Search Service API.
  • closest_noaa_stations() finds stations within a distance of a target coordinate and ranks them by geodesic distance.
  • ncei_stations() is the lower-level function underlying both helpers; it can search any NCEI dataset.

Note: All functions in this vignette contact the NCEI API. Set PREMETABOLIZER_RUN_VIGNETTES=true to run the API chunks; they are skipped by default during package installation and checks.

Study site

Kings Creek drains the Konza Prairie Biological Station near Manhattan, Kansas (39.1069°N, 96.6117°W). The USGS monitoring location USGS-06879650 records daily discharge, gage height, and water temperature throughout water year 2025.

lat_kings  <- 39.1068806
lon_kings  <- -96.6117151
wy_start   <- "2024-10-01"
wy_end     <- "2025-09-30"

Search for stations

Use ncei_bbox() to build a bounding box from a center point and radius, then pass it to get_noaa_stations():

bbox <- ncei_bbox(latitude = lat_kings, longitude = lon_kings, dist_km = 100)
bbox
ks_stations <- get_noaa_stations(bbox = bbox)

glimpse(ks_stations)

Filter to stations that carry the variables you need and span at least part of water year 2025:

wx_stations <- get_noaa_stations(
  bbox       = bbox,
  data_types = c("TMAX", "TMIN", "PRCP"),
  start_date = wy_start,
  end_date   = wy_end
)

wx_stations |>
  select(station_id, station_name, latitude, longitude, start_date, end_date) |>
  arrange(station_name)

Find nearby stations

closest_noaa_stations() builds the bounding box automatically and returns stations sorted by geodesic distance from the target point:

konza_noaa <- closest_noaa_stations(
  latitude   = lat_kings,
  longitude  = lon_kings,
  dist_km    = 50,
  data_types = c("TMAX", "TMIN", "PRCP"),
  start_date = wy_start,
  end_date   = wy_end
)

konza_noaa |>
  select(distance_km, station_id, station_name, latitude, longitude)

Map the candidates before choosing a station:

ggplot(konza_noaa, aes(longitude, latitude)) +
  geom_point(aes(size = distance_km), color = "#2c7fb8") +
  annotate("point", x = lon_kings, y = lat_kings, color = "#d95f0e", size = 3) +
  coord_quickmap() +
  labs(
    x     = "Longitude",
    y     = "Latitude",
    size  = "Distance (km)",
    title = "NOAA stations near Kings Creek"
  ) +
  theme_bw()

Download daily weather data

Pick the nearest station and download daily temperature and precipitation for water year 2025 with ncei_data():

station_id <- konza_noaa |>
  arrange(distance_km) |>
  pull(station_id) |>
  first()

station_id
daily_wx <- ncei_data(
  dataset    = "daily-summaries",
  stations   = station_id,
  start_date = wy_start,
  end_date   = wy_end,
  data_types = c("TMAX", "TMIN", "PRCP")
)

glimpse(daily_wx)

With units = "metric" (the default), ncei_data() returns tmax and tmin in °C and prcp in mm. The date column is already a Date:

ggplot(daily_wx, aes(date)) +
  geom_ribbon(aes(ymin = tmin, ymax = tmax), alpha = 0.3, fill = "#2c7fb8") +
  geom_line(aes(y = (tmax + tmin) / 2), color = "#2c7fb8") +
  labs(
    x     = NULL,
    y     = "Air temperature (°C)",
    title = "Daily temperature range near Kings Creek, WY 2025"
  ) +
  theme_bw()

Barometric pressure and PAR

GHCND covers temperature and precipitation well, but barometric pressure records are sparse in this region. For pressure and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), use get_nasa_data() to pull modeled values from NASA POWER, or get_ghcnh() to download observed hourly pressure from the GHCNh archive.

stream_data <- tibble(
  dateTime = seq(
    as.POSIXct(paste(wy_start, "00:00:00"), tz = "UTC"),
    as.POSIXct(paste(wy_end, "23:00:00"), tz = "UTC"),
    by = "1 hour"
  )
)

nasa_wx <- get_nasa_data(
  data      = stream_data,
  latitude  = lat_kings,
  longitude = lon_kings,
  elev_m    = 320
)

glimpse(nasa_wx)

The PSC column contains elevation-corrected barometric pressure (kPa), light.obs contains PAR (µmol/m²/s), T2M air temperature (°C), and PRECTOTCORR precipitation (mm/hr).

Use station IDs with GHCNh data

The station_id values returned by closest_noaa_stations() also identify GHCNh files. Pass them directly to get_ghcnh():

station_id

See vignette("ghcnh", package = "preMetabolizer") for a full hourly-data workflow.