NEWS

PEcAn.data.atmosphere 1.9.1

New function sat_vapor_pressure() computes saturation vapor pressure from temperature (#3597).
New function AmeriFlux_met_ensemble() generates weather ensembles from Ameriflux data with ERA5 fallback for missing radiation and soil moisture (#3586).
ERA5_met_process() gains option n_cores to process ensemble data efficiently in parallel (#3563).
download.ERA5_cds gains options time, dataset, product_type, all defaulting to the values previously hard-coded (#3547).

downscale_solar_geom_halfhour(): corrected the hour-of-day calculation from * 48 to * 24. The previous formula produced a half-hour index (0-47) instead of an hour of day (0-23), causing cos_solar_zenith_angle() to compute a solar hour angle roughly pi radians off and therefore wrong potential shortwave radiation in all half-hourly downscaled met files.
Fixed download_NOAA_GEFS_EFI: the sitename filter compared the argument to itself (sitename == sitename), always returning data for all NEON sites instead of the requested one. Changed to .data$sitename == sitename.
Updated download.NOAA_GEFS to work with the current (v12.3) release of GEFS (#3349).

Dependency nneo, used by download.NEONmet, is now suggested rather than required. Caution: nneo is unmaintained, has been archived by its author on GitHub, and may be removed from a future PEcAn release.
Dependency ggplot2 is now suggested rather than required. It is used in two vignettes and for optional diagnostic plots from debias_met_regression.
download.ERA5_cds now downloads NetCDF directly (replacing internal conversion from grib) using the R package ecmwfr (replacing python dependency on cdsapi via reticulate) (#3547).
download.ERA5.cds() now requires a valid Copernicus CDS API key, replacing the previous .netrc authentication. See the ecmwfr package documentation for details.
extract.nc.ERA5() and met2CF.ERA5 now support both ensemble and single-member data products (#3584).
added support for soil temperature, relative humidity, soil moisture, and PPFD downscaling to met_temporal_downscale.Gaussian_ensemble (#3586).
Removed sitename and username from the formal arguments of download.NOAA_GEFS. Before they were silently ignored, now they're treated as part of ... (which is also ignored!) (#3349).

download.AmerifluxLBL no longer wrongly re-fetches raw zipfiles when overwrite = FALSE

Functions that take argument site_id now accept strings as well as BETYdb numeric IDs.
download.ERA5.old renamed to download.ERA5_cds

Helper function db.site.lat.lon has been removed. Users should use PEcAn.DB::query.site(id, con)[c("lat", "lon")] instead [@Sweetdevil144, #3308]
Removed browndog.net; the Browndog service is defunct.

Extensive code cleanup and fixes to function documentation [@moki1202, ; @meetagrawal, #3212; @aariq, #3055; @Its-Maniaco, #2954]
Retired packages maptools and rgdal are no longer imported [@istfer, #3228]
Unit conversion now uses PEcAn.utils::ud_convert to avoid relying on orphaned package udunits2 [@nanu1695, #2989]
download.MERRA() now respects overwrite = FALSE [@meetagrawal09, #3169]
download.MERRA() can now find data from September of 2020 [@KristinaRiemer, #2888]
download.Fluxnet2015() now gives a more useful message when passed a malformed URL [@meetagrawal, #3130]
cfmet.downscale.hourly now produces the correct number of rows for timesteps other than 1 hour (#3270). Note that at extreme timesteps the downscaling algorithm may or may not give sensible values; this patch just ensures it gives the number of values you asked for.

Newly supported met data sources:
- ERA5 via ERA5_met_process() [@DongchenZ, #2886]
- NOAA GEFS data hosted by the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, via download_NOAA_GEFS_EFI() [@helge22a, #3174] (For GEFS data directly from NOAA, continue to use download.NOAA_GEFS)
Integration tests of met download from CRUNCEP (#3203), ERA5 (#3207), and Ameriflux (#3208) [@meetagrawal09]

Download of Ameriflux data now uses the amerifluxr package, replacing old custom download code [@HenriKajasilta, #2907]
metgapfill() can now handle partial years [@istfer, #2878]
Downscaling and load.cfmet now return plain data frames rather than data.tables. Package data.table is no longer a dependency.

Helper function robustly has moved to package PEcAn.utils [@meetagrawal, #3096]

All changes in 1.7.1 and earlier were recorded in a single file for all of the PEcAn packages; please see https://github.com/PecanProject/pecan/blob/v1.7.1/CHANGELOG.md for details.