ABSTRACT
This chapter presents several analyses using the PRISM dataset. It uses a different approach for bringing data into R. County boundaries and gridded climate and meteorological data will be imported directly from online archives using two R packages specifically designed to facilitate data access: tigris and prism. To calculate zonal statistics, it is necessary to convert the vector polygon dataset of counties to a raster dataset in which each raster cell is coded with the 5-digit FIPS code of the corresponding county. One of the most effective ways to assess data processing errors is through visualization. There seems to be a very strong relationship between the two data sources. However, the Oklahoma Mesonet dataset is one of the sources of station data that are used to develop the interpolated PRISM dataset.
