Sun and Atmosphere Calculations • photobiologySunCalc

Package ‘photobiologySunCalc’ implements Meeus’ accurate algorithms for the computation of the position of the sun, usable far into the past and future. It also implements the computation of local solar time, daylength, nightlength and times of sunset and sunrise, based on both accepted and arbitrary sun elevation angles for twilight. It implements Kasten and Young’s (1998) approximation formula for optical air mass (AM). The Pennman-Monteith equation for the estimation of reference evapotranspiration is implemented for the different versions recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Conversions between different physical quantities and units used to describe the water content of air are also provided.

This package is part of a suite of R packages for photobiological calculations described at the r4photobiology web site and in the vignette The R for Photobiology Suite.

This package is a “spin-off” from package ‘photobiology’.

Examples

The first examples show some simple astronomical calculations for the sun.

library(photobiologySunCalc)

geocode <- data.frame(lon = 0, lat = 55)
date <- lubridate::now(tzone = "UTC")
sunrise_time(date, tz = "UTC", geocode = geocode)
#> [1] "2024-08-06 04:19:10 UTC"
day_length(date, tz = "UTC", geocode = geocode)
#> [1] 15.55599

Installation

Installation of the most recent stable version from CRAN:

install.packages("photobiologySunCalc")

Installation of the current unstable version from R-Universe CRAN-like repository:

install.packages('photobiologySunCalc', 
                 repos = c('https://aphalo.r-universe.dev', 
                           'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

Installation of the current unstable version from GitHub:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("aphalo/photobiology")

Documentation

HTML documentation is available at (https://docs.r4photobiology.info/photobiologySunCalc/), including three User Guides.

News on updates to the different packages of the ‘r4photobiology’ suite are regularly posted at (https://www.r4photobiology.info/).

Two articles introduce the basic ideas behind the design of the suite and describe its use: Aphalo P. J. (2015) (https://doi.org/10.19232/uv4pb.2015.1.14) and Aphalo P. J. (2016) (https://doi.org/10.19232/uv4pb.2016.1.15).

A book is under preparation, and the draft is currently available at (https://leanpub.com/r4photobiology/).

A handbook written before the suite was developed contains useful information on the quantification and manipulation of ultraviolet and visible radiation: Aphalo, P. J., Albert, A., Björn, L. O., McLeod, A. R., Robson, T. M., & Rosenqvist, E. (Eds.) (2012) Beyond the Visible: A handbook of best practice in plant UV photobiology (1st ed., p. xxx + 174). Helsinki: University of Helsinki, Department of Biosciences, Division of Plant Biology. ISBN 978-952-10-8363-1 (PDF), 978-952-10-8362-4 (paperback). PDF file available from (https://hdl.handle.net/10138/37558).

Contributing

Pull requests, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome at (https://github.com/aphalo/photobiologySunCalc).

Citation

If you use this package to produce scientific or commercial publications, please cite according to:

citation("photobiologySunCalc")
#> To cite package ‘photobiologySunCalc’ in publications use:
#> 
#>   Aphalo, Pedro J. (2015) The r4photobiology suite. UV4Plants Bulletin,
#>   2015:1, 21-29. DOI:10.19232/uv4pb.2015.1.14
#> 
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#> 
#>   @Article{,
#>     author = {Pedro J. Aphalo},
#>     title = {The r4photobiology suite},
#>     journal = {UV4Plants Bulletin},
#>     volume = {2015},
#>     number = {1},
#>     pages = {21-29},
#>     year = {2015},
#>     doi = {10.19232/uv4pb.2015.1.14},
#>   }

photobiologySunCalc

Examples

Installation

Documentation

Contributing

Citation

License