Rdwd, an open source software solution developed at at the Institute of Earth and Environmental Science at Potsdam University (Germany) is making it easy to study records made public by the German weather service (DWD, Deutscher Wetterdienst).
Earlier this month, at the Fosdem conference in Brussels, Potsdam University climate researcher Berry Boessenkool presented Rdwd, a software solution (written in R) for analysing DWD data. The software makes it possible to select, download, read and process weather data, from within the R environment.
“Rdwd lets researchers focus on scientific problems instead of data management”, says Boessenkool, who teaches R programming at the university.
The software was used, for example, to research the 29 May 2016 flash flood that damaged Braunsbach, a village in Baden-Württemberg. “Never in recent history have I seen a flood like this”, Boessenkool said. He was one of the researchers in the taskforce set up to study the event.
Boessenkool made Rdwd available as open source software last year. The software is published using the GNU General Public Licence (GPLv2).