rpollution

rpollution is an R package for visualizing or obtaining future, historic and current air pollution data using the OpenWeather API. Our goal is to enable users the ability to explore air pollution levels in locations around the world by providing visual charts and graphs. We make the data accessible and easy to comprehend in just a few lines of code.

Although there is an abundance of weather packages and APIs in the R ecosystem, this particular package looks at specifically air pollution data and uses the Air Pollution API from OpenWeather. This is a unique package which provides simple and easy to use functions and allows users to quickly access and visualise data.

The data returned from the API includes the polluting gases such as Carbon monoxide (CO), Nitrogen monoxide (NO), Nitrogen dioxide (NO2), Ozone (O3), Sulphur dioxide (SO2), Ammonia (NH3), and particulates (PM2.5 and PM10).

Using the OpenWeatherMap API requires sign up to gain access to an API key.
For more information about API call limits and API care recommendations please visit the OpenWeather how to start page.

Functions

This package contains 3 functions:

get_air_pollution()

Fetches the air pollution levels based on a location. Based on the values of the polluting gases, this package uses the Air Quality Index to determine the level of pollution for the location and produces a coloured map of the area displaying the varying regions of air quality.

get_pollution_history()

Requires a start and end date and fetches historic air pollution data for a specific location. The function returns a data frame with the values of the polluting gases over the specified date range.

get_pollution_forecast()

Fetches air pollution data for the next 5 days for a specific location. The function returns a time series plot of the predicted pollution levels.

Installation

You can install the development version of rpollution from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("UBC-MDS/rpollution")

Usage

  1. Create an OpenWeather API Key
  2. Install rpollution

To use the package, import the package with the following command:

Retrieve historic pollution data with specified date range and location:

get_pollution_history(1606488670, 1606747870, 49.28, 123.12, api_key)

Generate an interactive map containing current pollution data by location:

get_air_pollution(49.28, 123.12, api_key, "Current Air Pollution")

Generate a time-series line chart of forecasted air pollution data:

get_pollution_forecast(49.28, 123.12, api_key)

Documentation

The official documentation is hosted here: https://ubc-mds.github.io/rpollution/

Contributors

  • Christopher Alexander (@christopheralex)
  • Daniel King (@danfke)
  • Mel Liow (@mel-liow)

Contributing

Interested in contributing? Check out the contributing guidelines. Please note that the rpollution project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

License

rpollution was created by Christopher Alexander, Daniel King, Mel Liow. It is licensed under the terms of the Hippocratic License 3.0.