eevenden/SouthAfricaDrought

An R package designed to calculate drought indices for South Africa. This package includes drought index functions, rainfall data, and a vignette demonstrating the use of the functions and displaying results. # SouthAfricaDrought Authors: Emily Evenden and Maseeng Masitha Date: December 22, 2020 ## Introduction This page hosts the R-package "SouthAfricaDrought", our final project for the "Geospatial Analysis with R" course at Clark University. We aim to identify areas of drought in South Africa over the summer season of November, 2019, to March, 2020. Drought is determined by persisting stretches of no rainfall. We will use two drought indices which rely solely on rainfall data: the Deciles Index and the NOAA Drought Index to identify areas of South Africa experiencing drought. Through this project, we hope to program easy drought metrics for South Africa which could be used to determine early warnings of low crop yields. ## Primary Objectives - Make long-term and short-term rainfall data available to the user in both monthly and weekly time intervals - Program two drought indices - Identify areas in South Africa that experienced drought last Summer (2019-2020). ## Approach and Method ### Data This package contains five datasets: 1. SouthAfrica_Boundary - a vector file containing the boundary of South Africa provided by the Humanitarian Data Exchange (available here: data.humdata.org) 2. SA_MODIS_Monthly_Mean_Temperature - a raster stack of the average monthly temperature (in Celsius) for South Africa. This dataset is not currently used in any of the indices we created, but is available for future use if more indices are added. 3. & 4. SA_Chirps_Weekly_Mean_Precip & SA_Chirps_Monthly_Mean_Precip - these datasets are two different aggregations of the daily Chirps precipitation data. Obviously, the weekly data is aggregated by week while the monthly data is aggregated by month. The unit of this dataset is mm of rainfall per day. 5. SA_Chirps_30yr_Monthly_Mean_Precip - this datasets is also dervied from the Chirps daily precipitation dataset. Each raster layer in this dataset shows the 30 year average of …