bioRad: Biological Analysis and Visualization of Weather Radar Data

bioRad 0.7.1 includes a major backend overhaul that deprecates the use of Docker. All Docker-dependent functionality is now included in the new dependency package vol2birdR package, which needs to be installed as part of bioRad. All bioRad functions remain the same, but several functions will run considerable faster.

New features

• bioRad is now fully available on Windows.

• Simplified installation, including automatic installation of rhdf5 from bioconductor (#464).

• Faster implementations of functions previously dependent on Docker, such as calculate_vp(), apply_mistnet() and read_pvolfile().

• Support for reading VPTS CSV format through updated function read_vpts(). VPTS CSV table schema included to allow offline parsing of VPTS CSV files as a frictionless data package (#551, #590)

• Updated function read_vpts() supports reading vp/vpts data in ODIM HDF, VPTS CSV format (#551, #590)

• New function list_vpts_aloft() produces a list of aloft archive URLs for time series of vertical profiles (vpts). This list of URLs can then be used to bulk download data using any number of external tools (#553).

• New function read_stdout() replaces previous functionality of read_vpts() to read vol2bird stdout format. It also has a new sep argument (#536) to support both fixed-delimited and comma-separated stdout data.

• New function as.vpts converts a data.frame originating from a VPTS CSV file into a vpts object (#555). Inverse operation of as.data.frame.vpts

• read_pvolfiles() now allows ODIM H5 files with missing source attribute. The functionality is similar to read_vpfiles(), i.e. extracting the NOD, RAD or WMO identifier, otherwise using unknown (2f6935c).

• bind_into_vpts() now works for vp and vpts objects with different heights (#343)

• Faster parallel mistnet runs (https://github.com/adokter/vol2birdR/issues/16).

Bugfixes

• Fix bug in height integration, which excluded the lowest bins for certain low altitude radars (#534).

Deprecations

• Argument local_install in calculate_vp() and apply_mistnet() is now deprecated.

• Functions check_docker() and update_docker() have been deprecated.

• Function vol2bird_version() has been migrated to package vol2birdR and can be accessed by vol2birdR::vol2bird_version().

• Dependency maptools has been replaced with suntools, rgdal has been removed in accordance with the evolution of sp and the imminent archiving of rgdal

• Function as.data.frame.vpts() has output column names lat, lon, antenna_height renamed to radar_latitude, radar_longitude, radar_height for compatibility with the VPTS CSV data format. The function also outputs an additional column radar_wavelength (#609)