Download and plot essential climate data

Retrieves global wildfire burnt area and fire count data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), operated by the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. https://gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/gwis.statistics/seasonaltrend

Usage

get_fires_area(
  place = "WORLD",
  year = as.numeric(format(Sys.Date(), "%Y")),
  use_cache = TRUE,
  write_cache = getOption("hs_write_cache")
)

Arguments

place

(string) Region or country for which to retrieve data. May be one of the following regional aggregates: "WORLD" (default), "UN_EUR" (Europe), "UN_AFR" (Africa), "UN_ASI" (Asia), "UN_AME" (Americas), or "UN_OCE" (Oceania). Alternatively, supply an ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code such as "USA", "CAN", or "BRA".

year

(numeric) Four-digit year for which to retrieve data. Must be 2012 or later. Defaults to the current year.

use_cache

(boolean) Return cached data if available, defaults to TRUE. Use FALSE to fetch updated data.

write_cache

(boolean) Write data to cache, defaults to FALSE. Use TRUE to write data to cache for later use. Can also be set using options(hs_write_cache=TRUE)

Value

Invisibly returns a tibble with weekly and cumulative wildfire burnt area and fire count data for the requested place and year. Weekly columns include date, events, events_min, events_max, events_avg, area_ha, area_ha_min, area_ha_avg, and area_ha_max. Cumulative columns are prefixed with cum_.

Details

get_fires_area invisibly returns a tibble with weekly and year-to-date cumulative wildfire burnt area (in hectares) and fire event counts sourced from the GWIS API. Historical minimum, maximum, and average baselines are included for comparison. Data coverage begins in 2012. Cache filenames include the place and year so that multiple queries can be cached independently.

References

Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), Copernicus Emergency Management Service / European Commission Joint Research Centre. https://gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/gwis.statistics/seasonaltrend

Author

Hernando Cortina, hch@alum.mit.edu

Examples

# \donttest{
# Fetch global data for the current year from cache if available:
fires <- get_fires_area()
#
# Fetch data for Canada in 2023:
fires_can <- get_fires_area(place = 'CAN', year = 2023)
#
# Force cache refresh:
fires <- get_fires_area(use_cache = FALSE)
#
# Review cache contents and last update dates:
hockeystick_cache_details() # }
#> <hockeystick cached files>
#>   directory: /home/runner/.cache/R/hockeystick
#>