In a recent project I wanted to use the drought index Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). The website of the indicator offers rich information and gives you two options to download SPEI data: either by single location or get an netCDF file.

This got me started to explore the file format netCDF and the R package ncdf4. The post by Bartlein P. J. (R for Earth-System Science helped me initially a lot and is foundation for some of the functions I present here.

In the process of working on the SPEI data (extracting data frames from the netCDF files and adjusting and visualizing the data) I decided to share my code. To make the re-use as easy as possible I ended up creating a package, getSpei, on github and I demonstrate on this website the use of the package and visualization of the data generated with it. I hope it helps!

• getSpei, demonstration

For more information about me: here

Thanks to Karl Broman who as a good tutorial on how to create a simple website on github.