Happy World Ocean Day! World Ocean Day is a day of celebration and action to protect our shared ocean. While I already appreciate the importance of protecting sensitive ecosystems, including the ocean ¹ , I found the idea of World Ocean Day especially touching.

I’ve recently released the new package ccafs, which provides accessto data from Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security(CCAFS; http://ccafs-climate.org/) General Circulation Models (GCM) data.GCM’s are a particular type of climate model, used for weather forecasting,and climate change forecasting - read more athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_circulation_model.

One of the goals of the rOpenSci is to facilitate interoperability between different data sources around web with our tools. We can achieve this by providing functionality within our packages that converts data coming down via web APIs in one format (often a provider specific schema) into a standard format. The new version of rWBclimate that we just posted to CRAN does just that.

I recently attended ScienceOnline Climate, a conference in Washington, D.C. at AAAS. You may have heard of the ScienceOnline annual meeting in North Carolina - this was one of their topical meetings focused on Climate Change. I moderated a session on working with data from the web in R, focusing on climate data. Search Twitter for #scioClimate for tweets from the conference, and #sciordata for tweets from the session I ran.