Package overview and features
The climatrics R package contains a separate function to
facilitate quantifying each climate change metric, also a function
(“ccm” ) to quantify some or several of the metrics together.
Moreover, the package provides additional functions including
“apply.months” , “kgc”, and “temporalTrend ”
(Figure 1). The “apply.months” function is an auxiliary
function that calculates monthly statistics from a time series of
climate data. The output of apply.months contains twelve raster
layers (from January to December). For instance, a user can choose the
mean function as the input to calculate the monthly mean climate data
for the 12 months.
The “kgc” function is another auxiliary function to calculate
Köppen-Geiger (see Köppen, 1900; Peel et al., 2007) classification of
climate data in a given location and time. The Köppen-Geiger system
classifies the climate zones of the world into five main classes and 30
sub-classes (Chen & Chen, 2013; Beck et al., 2018) and is based on
threshold values (See table S1 for criteria and legend) and seasonality
of monthly temperature and precipitation. The “kgc ” function
provides the inputs for calculating the Changes in Distance to Analogous
Climates (daClimate) metrics in climetrics . The
“temporalTrend” function quantifies the trend and pattern of
climate parameters over time. A higher positive slope of the given
climate variable represents an increase over time and a negative value
represents temporal decline over time.