R

In the field of data visualization, the animation of spatial data in its temporal dimension can show fascinating changes and patterns. As a result of one of the last publications in the social networks that I have made, I was asked to make a post about how I created it. Well, here we go to start with an example of data from mainland Spain.

I recently created a visualization of the distribution of river flow directions and also of coastal orientations. Following its publication in social networks, I was asked to make a post about how I did it. Well, here we go to start with an example of rivers, coastal orientation is somewhat more complex.

The tidyverse universe of packages, a collection of packages specially focused on data science, marked a milestone in R programming. In this post I am going to summarize very briefly the most essential to start in this world. The tidyverse grammar follows a common structure in all functions. The most essential thing is that the first argument is the object and then come the rest of the arguments. In addition, a set of verbs is provided to facilitate the use of the functions. The tidyverse philosophy and grammar of functions structure is also reflected in other packages that make its use compatible with the collection of tidyverse.

When we visualize precipitation and temperature anomalies, we simply use time series as bar graph indicating negative and positive values in red and blue. However, in order to have a better overview we need both anomalies in a single graph. In this way we could more easly answer the question of whether a particular season or month was dry-warm or wet-cold, and even compare these anomalies in the context of previous years.

The first post of this year 2020, I will dedicate to a question that I was recently asked. The question was how to calculate the shortest distance between different points and how to know which is the closest point. When we work with spatial data in R, currently the easiest thing is to use the sf package in combination with the tidyverse collection of packages. We also use the units package which is very useful for working with units of measurement.