climateBR: An R package to download meteorological data from Brazil

Introduction

climateBR supports research on climate shocks by providing functions for each stage of working with climate data:

  • download_inmet() downloads the ZIP files with INMET weather station data from the Brazilian government’s website.
  • build_inmet_dataset() converts the raw files into a partitioned dataset.
  • read_inmet() reads and filters that dataset.
  • nearest_stations() and kriging_inmet() link municipalities to INMET stations, so climate data can be merged with other sources, such as IBGE or TSE, for statistical analysis.

This vignette demonstrates the core workflow of climateBR.

Installation

Stable version (CRAN)

install.packages("climateBR")

Development version

# install.packages("remotes")

remotes::install_github("kaiorb52/climateBR")

Download data

First, download the original files published by INMET.


raw_dir <- file.path(tempdir(), "inmet_raw")
dataset_dir <- file.path(tempdir(), "inmet_arrow")

download_inmet(
  years = 2000:2005,
  unzip_to = raw_dir
)

Build the dataset

Next, convert the downloaded files into a partitioned Arrow dataset. This only needs to be done once and makes later analyses much faster.

build_inmet_dataset(
  input = raw_dir,
  output = dataset_dir
)

Read the dataset

The read_inmet() function reads the partitioned dataset and can return either an Arrow Dataset (collect = FALSE) or an in-memory data frame (collect = TRUE).

Keep collect = FALSE when working with long time spans: the full INMET dataset contains millions of observations, and loading all of them into memory with collect = TRUE may exceed the available RAM and crash R.

rainfall <- read_inmet(
  path = dataset_dir,
  years = 2000,
  collect = FALSE
)

Inspect and clean the observations before analysis. In some historical INMET files, missing values are coded as -9999 instead of NA; convert them to NA before computing summaries or fitting models.

How to Cite

When using climateBR in academic publications, please cite the package as follows:

citation("climateBR")
#> To cite package 'climateBR' in publications use:
#> 
#>   Bárbara K (2026). _climateBR: Download Rainfall, Temperature, and
#>   Wind Data from Brazil_. R package version 0.2.5,
#>   <https://github.com/kaiorb52/climateBR>.
#> 
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#> 
#>   @Manual{,
#>     title = {climateBR: Download Rainfall, Temperature, and Wind Data from Brazil},
#>     author = {Kaio Bárbara},
#>     year = {2026},
#>     note = {R package version 0.2.5},
#>     url = {https://github.com/kaiorb52/climateBR},
#>   }