R Package Authorship

Developing open-source tools for the R community.

As well as authoring many private R packages to streamline data analysis pipelines for myself and colleagues, I have also developed publicly available packages, many of which focused on air quality data analysis.

During my PhD I dabbled in package authorship to collect together personal, miscellaneous functions useful for my work. This experience led to creating several packages used throughout the group for reading awkward instrument data, scraping data from online databases, and perfoming statistical modelling of road transport emissions.

When I started working in consultancy and R development full-time I became involved in open-source package authorship by becoming an author for the openair project let by Professor David Carslaw. The openair toolkit is a collection of R packages for atmospheric data analysis, including:

{openair}

The original toolbox of plotting, analysis, and data access functions.

openair::polarPlot(openair::mydata, "nox")

Figure 1: A polar plot, one of the most attractive features of openair.

{worldmet}

A tool for obtaining world meteorological data from the NOAA ISD database.

worldmet::getMeta(returnMap = TRUE)

Figure 2: A map of NOAA ISD meteorological stations obtained using worldmet.

{openairmaps}

A package which combines openair with leaflet to create interactive air quality maps. I am the lead developer on this specific package.

openairmaps::polarMap(openairmaps::polar_data,
                      "nox",
                      latitude = "lat",
                      longitude = "lon")

Figure 3: A map of openair::polarPlot()s, produced using openairmaps.

Examples of R packages I have helped develop can be found in my portfolio.