AWAPer: an R package for area weighted catchment daily meteorological data anywhere within Australia

Meteorological time-series data are a fundamental input to hydrological investigations. But sourcing data is often laborious and plagued with difficulties. In an effort to improve efficiency and rigor we present an R-package, named AWAPer (https://github.com/peterson-tim-j/AWAPer), for the efficient estimation of daily area weighted catchment average and spatial variance of meteorological variables, including evapotranspiration. The package allows creation and updating of a data-cube of gridded daily data from 1900 onwards. Once created, point and area weighted estimates can be extracted at user-defined locations and time periods for anywhere within Australia. Examples of point and catchment average extraction are presented.