The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by dogado GmbH, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider. Check out our Wordpress Tutorial.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]dogado.de.

Introduction to the RivRetrieve R package

Ryan M. Riggs and Simon Moulds

April 22, 2024

Here is a quick tutorial for RivRetrieve functions:

The RivRetrieve package is developed to efficiently access and download global river gauge data into an R environment. While numerous river data exists, our package is currently limited to daily measurements of river stage (meters) and discharge (cubic meters per second) for: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Japan, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

library(RivRetrieve)
# Amazon River near Obidos, Brazil
## siteNumber='17050001'
## discharge=brazil(site=siteNumber,variable='discharge')
## stage=brazil(site=siteNumber,variable='stage')
siteNumber="K027401001"
discharge=france(site=siteNumber,variable='discharge')
stage=france(site=siteNumber,variable='stage')
plot(discharge$Date,discharge$Q, type='l',xlab='',ylab='Discharge (cms)')

RivRetrieve automatically outputs a dataframe containing a Date column of datetime values and either a H or Q numeric column for the stage and discharge variable, respectively.

Stage is provided in meters and discharge is provided in cubic meters per second.

Accessing the raw gauge data:

raw=original(discharge)
library(knitr)
## kable(raw[1:5,],caption='Raw Brazilian gauge data')
kable(raw[1:5,],caption='Raw French gauge data')
Raw French gauge data
code_site code_station date_obs_elab resultat_obs_elab date_prod code_statut libelle_statut code_methode libelle_methode code_qualification libelle_qualification longitude latitude grandeur_hydro_elab
K0274010 K027401001 1997-12-19 386 2024-02-28T12:02:09Z 16 Donnée validée 12 Interpolation 20 Bonne 3.962542 45.05748 QmJ
K0274010 K027401001 1997-12-20 400 2024-02-28T12:02:09Z 16 Donnée validée 12 Interpolation 20 Bonne 3.962542 45.05748 QmJ
K0274010 K027401001 1997-12-21 381 2024-02-28T12:02:09Z 16 Donnée validée 12 Interpolation 20 Bonne 3.962542 45.05748 QmJ
K0274010 K027401001 1997-12-22 356 2024-02-28T12:02:09Z 16 Donnée validée 12 Interpolation 20 Bonne 3.962542 45.05748 QmJ
K0274010 K027401001 1997-12-23 324 2024-02-28T12:02:09Z 16 Donnée validée 12 Interpolation 20 Bonne 3.962542 45.05748 QmJ

Site locations for all agencies can also be found:

## brazilSites=brazil(sites=TRUE)
franceSites=france(sites=TRUE)
## kable(brazilSites[1:10,],caption='Example Brazilian river gauge locations')
kable(franceSites[1:10,],caption='Example French river gauge locations')
Example French river gauge locations
site latitude longitude
1011000101 16.18940 -61.65899
1011000201 16.19583 -61.65195
1011000301 16.19395 -61.65561
1011000401 16.15827 -61.67278
1015000101 16.17600 -61.69320
1016000101 16.19914 -61.66644
1016000201 16.20282 -61.65723
1016000301 16.19343 -61.67339
1020000101 16.20512 -61.65309
1021000101 16.22531 -61.66868

Date defined retrieval

Specific time periods can also be accessed if the entire time series is not needed.

# Annual timeseries
## siteNumber='17050001'
siteNumber="K027401001"
start='2009-01-01'
end='2010-01-31'
## recent=brazil(site=siteNumber,variable='stage',start_date = start,end_date = end)
recent=france(site=siteNumber,variable='stage',start_date = start,end_date = end)
plot(recent$Date,recent$H,type='l', xlab='',ylab='Stage (m)')

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.