Introduction Choosing colors for a graphic is a bit like taking a trip down the rabbit hole, that is, it can take much longer than expected and be both fun and frustrating at the same time. Striking a balance between colors that look good to you and your audience is ...

Finding the Location Furthest from Water in the Conterminous United States The idea for this post came a few months back when I received an email that started, “I am a writer and teacher and am reaching out to you with a question related to a piece I would like ...

Introduction There are many different R packages for dealing with spatial data. The main distinctions between them involve the types of data they work with — raster or vector — and the sophistication of the analyses they can do. Raster data can be thought of as pixels, similar to an image, while ...

Boxplots are often used to show data distributions, and ggplot2 is often used to visualize data. A question that comes up is what exactly do the box plots represent? The ggplot2 box plots follow standard Tukey representations, and there are many references of this online and in standard statistical text ...

R can create almost any plot imaginable and as with most things in R if you don’t know where to start, try Google. The Introduction to R curriculum summarizes some of the most used plots, but cannot begin to expose people to the breadth of plot options that exist....

What we couldn’t cover In the data cleaning portion of our Intro to R class, we cover a variety of common data manipulation tasks. Most of these were achieved using the package dplyr, including removing or retaining certain columns (select), filtering out rows by column condition (filter), creating new ...

Introduction This document gives a brief introduction to making static and dynamic maps using inlmisc, an R package developed by researchers at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Project Office. Included with inlmisc is a collection of functions for creating high-level graphics, such as graphs, maps, ...

Introduction This document describes how to produce a set of graphics and perform the associated statistical tests that describe trends in daily streamflow at a single streamgage. The trends depicted cover the full range of quantiles of the streamflow distribution, from the lowest discharge of the year, through the median ...

What happened? A magnitude 8.1 earthquake was measured in the Pacific region offshore Chiapas, Mexico at 04:49:21 UTC on September 8th 2017. Working in the Water Mission Area for the USGS, our Data Science Team was already hard at work polishing up water visualizations for the devastating Hurricane Harvey, as well as creating ...

Introduction The Hydro Network-Linked Data Index (NLDI) is a system that can index data to NHDPlus V2 catchments and offers a search service to discover indexed information. Data linked to the NLDI includes active NWIS stream gages, water quality portal sites, and outlets of HUC12 watersheds. The NLDI is a ...

Introduction This document describes how to obtain seasonal information from the R package EGRET - Exploration and Graphics for RivEr Trends: An R-package for the analysis of long-term changes in water quality and streamflow, including the water-quality method Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS) For example, we might ...

This post will show simple way to calculate moving averages, calculate historical-flow quantiles, and plot that information. The goal is to reproduce the graph at this link: PA Graph. The motivation for this post was inspired by a USGS colleague that that is considering creating these type of plots in ...

Introduction This script utilizes the new dataRetrieval package access to the USGS Statistics Web Service. We will be pulling daily mean data using the daily value service in readNWISdata, and using the stats service data to put it in the context of the site’s history. Here we are retrieving ...

Introduction In this example, we will use the R programming language to access LOCA data via the OPeNDAP web service interface using the ncdf4 package then use the geoknife package to access LOCA data using the Geo Data Portal as a geoprocessing service. More examples like this can be found ...

Marcus Beck (USEPA) Laura DeCicco (USGS-OWI) Introduction EGRET is an R-package for the analysis of long-term changes in water quality and streamflow, and includes the water-quality method Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS). It is available on CRAN. More information can be found at https://github.com/USGS-R/...