[R-sig-Geo] reading into R IPCC data files

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 3:28 PM, Thomas Adams <Thomas.Adams at noaa.gov> wrote:
>
>
> Marco,
>
> I just took a look at the data; unfortunately, it's not in a very usable
> format without reformatting it for
> importing the data into either R or a GIS, such as GRASS GIS. I'm sure an
> experienced R programmer could
> write a clever R script to do what you want. Personally, I would write a
> Perl script to reformat the data to
> import directly into GRASS GIS. I looked at the HADCM3_A2a_PREC_1980.tar.gz
> data and it is cell-centered.
> GRASS grids are referenced by the lower-left grid corner. I noticed that
> there are many different grid spacings
> and not all the grids are square, they are rectangular. Bottom line is that
> a lot of care is going to be needed
> to manipulate these data sources. I have to think that somewhere there must
> be this same data available in grib
> format, which imports into GRASS very easily.
>
> Regards,
> Tom
>
>
> On 1/15/11 6:54 PM, Mario Bellinato wrote:
>>
>> Dear R-sig-geo users,
>>
>> I was wondering whether there is a way of reading into R the IPCC
>> climate scenario data (see
>> <http://www.ipcc-data.org/sres/hadcm3_download.html>) and export them
>> into a format that can be read by a GIS programme?
>>

That's a horrendous data file format, typical of the sort of thing you
get from Fortran programmers :)

There's a very complex-looking "web 0.1" style data browser thing here
which lets you eventually download .csv files which might be easier to
read into R. I think you can only get a month at a time though, and it
might not be the same data as in your original link (but the Hadley
centre stuff seems to be there...):

http://www.ipcc-data.org/cgi-bin/ddc_nav/dataset=ar4_gcm

 You'd almost think they don't want us to know about climate change....

Barry