B0987
Title: ARPALData: An R package to retrieve and analyze air quality and weather data for Lombardy
Authors: Paolo Maranzano - University of Milano-Bicocca & Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (Italy) [presenting]
Abstract: ARPALData is presented: an R package developed to retrieve, manage and analyze air quality and meteorological data from the open database of the Regional Environmental Protection Agency (ARPA Lombardia) of Lombardy, Italy. ARPALData addresses several issues: (1) data and metadata provided by ARPA are entirely in the Italian language, thus excluding all non-Italian users; (2) direct collection of data from the agency's portal requires heavy data manipulation; (3) air quality and climate conditions in Lombardy are continuously raising considerable interest from researchers and technicians involved in policy evaluation. \textit{ARPALData} package provides to the users seventeen functions, which can be re-grouped into three different categories according to their goal: 1) download, 2) classes check, and 3) data analysis and representation. The download functions aim at downloading and formatting the observations according to several filtering inputs provided by the user. The format-checking functions aim to verify that the input objects belong to appropriate object classes valid for applying the analysis functions. Eventually, the analysis and representation functions allow for the computation of descriptive statistics and graphical representation of the input data. The software (release 1.2.3) has been freely available on the R CRAN since April 2022.
