Presenting data with temporal and geographic features are often more engaging through animations and maps. This post will give a walkthrough on using R to extract the data from public sources, wrangle the data, and create an animation of a map.
The data we will be using is the daily weather summaries of 2020 provided by the Met Office (based in the UK). The data is stored as tables within a PDF, which we will have to parse using the pdftools package. The exact location (longitude and latitude) of each weather station will be referenced using web-scraping methods from the rvest package. To source the country boundary data and coordinates, we will use the rnaturalearth package, which sources the coordinates from Natural Earth.
To manipulate and wrangle the data, we will use the dplyr and tidyverse toolkit. For the plots, we will use the ggplot2, gganimate, and sf package.
This post will cover:
- PDF parsing
- Web scraping
- Data wrangling
- Plotting maps with
sf - Animating plots with
gganimate
Continue reading at https://kevinchtsang.github.io/weather-animation/