ShinyWeatherCan is an interactive R/Shiny app for exploring, downloading, and analyzing historical climate-station data from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).
Live app: https://nickrongkp.shinyapps.io/WeatherCan/
Data are pulled on-the-fly directly from the ECCC GeoMet-OGC-API
(https://api.weather.gc.ca/collections/climate-{daily,hourly,monthly}). Station metadata
comes from the ECCC station inventory (bundled as app/ec_station_inventory_en.csv, refreshed
from ECCC as needed).
Please be mindful of the shinyapps.io free tier — close the browser tab when you are done. Data are downloaded on demand and larger requests (especially hourly/daily over long periods) can take a while, so please be patient.
- Interactive station map — explore 8,000+ ECCC stations by province/territory; markers are color-coded by record length.
- Multi-station workflow — compare up to three stations (Primary / Secondary / Tertiary), or enter a Climate ID directly to skip the map.
- Flexible intervals — hourly, daily, or monthly records.
- Raw data review — interactive time-series plots plus monthly/yearly summary statistics with optional trend lines; export to CSV or Excel.
- Advanced Usage — ERA5-Land infilling — fill gaps in a station's daily record with bias-corrected ERA5-Land reanalysis (see below).
The Advanced Usage (ERA5 Infill) tab fills gaps in the Primary station's daily series with ERA5-Land reanalysis, bias-corrected to the station's own observations via Quantile Delta Mapping (QDM) (per calendar month), after an automated WMO/GHCN-style QA/QC of the observations. It reports calibration/validation CDF reviews, an infilled time series, summary statistics, and the percentage of each series that came from ERA5, all exportable to Excel.
You must supply your own free CDS API key.
- Register for a free account and copy your Personal Access Token from the CDS "How to use the API" page, then accept all dataset licences on your CDS profile → Licences.
- Enter your key in the app when prompted. Your key is used only for that run and is not stored on the server. (Full step-by-step instructions, including screenshots, are on the app's Advanced Usage → Instructions sub-tab.)
- Infilled values are model-based estimates, not measurements — use them at your own professional judgment and verify independently before relying on them.
The base app runs on shinyapps.io with no special setup. The ERA5 infilling feature additionally
needs a Python backend (xarray, zarr<3, fsspec, aiohttp, pandas) which is provisioned at
runtime by reticulate via py_require() (uv-managed
ephemeral environment — see app/functions_era5.R). The rest of the app works whether or not that
backend is available; ERA5 infilling fails gracefully with a message if it isn't.
Deploy from the repo root with rsconnect's Python bundling disabled so it defers to reticulate's self-managed environment (see rsconnect#1143 and this Posit Community thread):
options(rsconnect.python.enabled = FALSE)
rsconnect::deployApp("app")Do not set RETICULATE_PYTHON to a local virtualenv or bundle Python paths in
.Rprofile/.Renviron, and do not commit any CDS key (.gitignore covers CDSAPI_KEY and
.cdsapirc). R dependencies are pinned in app/renv.lock.
Copyright © 2025 Nick Rong & Nate Smith
Released under the
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
Data are sourced from Environment and Climate Change Canada; ERA5-Land reanalysis is provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) / ECMWF. Foundational ECCC data-retrieval methodology draws on work by Professor Dan Moore (UBC Geography). Development was supported by Knight Piésold Ltd.
Pull requests and stars are always welcome. For bugs and feature requests, please open an issue.
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.