The Rain Project: An R-based Open Source Analysis of Publicly Available Rainfall Data by Gopi Goteti.
From the post:
Rainfall data used by researchers in academia and industry does not always come in the same format. Data is often in atypical formats and in extremely large number of files and there is not always guidance on how to obtain, process and visualize the data. This project attempts to resolve this issue by serving as a hub for the processing of such publicly available rainfall data using R.
The goal of this project is to reformat rainfall data from their native format to a consistent format, suitable for use in data analysis. Within this project site, each dataset is intended to have its own wiki. Eventually, an R package would be developed for each data source.
Currently R code is available to process data from three sources – Climate Prediction Center (global coverage), US Historical Climatology Network (USA coverage) and APHRODITE (Asia/Eurasia and Middle East).
The project home page is here – http://rationshop.github.io/rain_r/
Links to the original sources:
US Historical Climatology Network
There are five (5) other sources listed at the project home page “to be included in the future.”
All of these datasets were “transparent” to someone, once upon a time.
Restoring them to transparency is a good deed.
Preventing datasets from going dark is an even better one.