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Alternatives to using BOM for data
Queensland has a proper API that would allow us to access BOM data for point and even gridded data.
- https://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/silo/about/overview/
- https://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/silo/about/data-products/
- https://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/silo/api-documentation/guide/
What say you, @HughParsonage and @jonocarroll? This would allow us to have access to the historical data. Not sure that it provides access to real-time though, so we would lose that functionality.
Should we pursue this capability?
I was going to suggest that a package focused on SILO would be a good idea. Sure enough, there's already at least one package accessing this data! https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/cropgrowdays/vignettes/getting-weather-data.html (they even acknowledge bomrang there).
There's also https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SWTools/index.html
My guess is we could leverage some of this, or discuss collaborating on breaking out the silo-related functionality to a dedicated package which bomrang and the other packages could leverage. Perhaps the SILO team would also like to be involved (?).
I've worked with Peter (one of the cropgrowdays authors), nice to see that bomrang was acknowledged.
I was thinking that bomrang already exists and ~~has~~ had facilities for fetching historical data, using SILO we could restore this functionality in a meaningful way for our users with the added value of some of the gridded data sets rather than a new package. But maybe a new one is the way to go and letting bomrang leverage it. From a DPIRD perspective, this would be beneficial as well.
The silo-specific package would be a pure API wrapper. bomrang would then use that for it's specific purposes, but other packages could also call it.
Hi @adamhsparks and @jonocarroll. I note that a year has passed since there was discussion here on alternatives, and i am still sorely missing being able to easily use bomrang to pull down historical Wx data from specific BOM (ahem, THE BUREAU) stations. Is there another solution or go-to package now? Thanks.
Unfortunately BOM doesn’t seem interested in supporting any such solutions, so, no. Right now nothing exists yet. The discussed workarounds all have their own drawbacks.