Question

I have one file (location) that has an x,y coordinates and a date/time identification. I want to get information from a second table (weather) that has a “similar” date/time variable and the co-variables (temperature and wind speed). The trick is the date/time are not exactly the same numbers in both tables. I want to select the weather data that is closest from the location data. I know I need to do some loops and thats about it.

Example location                                    example weather

x    y     date/time                         date/time           temp        wind
1    3     01/02/2003 18:00                  01/01/2003 13:00     12          15
2    3     01/02/2003 19:00                  01/02/2003 16:34     10          16
3    4     01/03/2003 23:00                  01/02/2003 20:55     14          22
2    5     01/04/2003 02:00                  01/02/2003 21:33     14          22
                                             01/03/2003 00:22     13          19
                                             01/03/2003 14:55     12          12
                                             01/03/2003 18:00     10          12
                                             01/03/2003 23:44     2           33
                                             01/04/2003 01:55     6           22

So the final output would be a table with the correctly “best” matched weather data to the location data

x    y     datetime               datetime           temp        wind
1    3     01/02/2003 18:00  ----  01/02/2003 16:34     10          16
2    3     01/02/2003 19:00  ----  01/02/2003 20:55     14          22
3    4     01/03/2003 23:00  ----  01/03/2003 00:22     13          19               
2    5     01/04/2003 02:00  ----  01/04/2003 01:55     6           22

Any suggestions where to start? I am trying to do this in R

Answer 1

I needed to bring that data in as data and time separately and then paste and format

location$dt.time <- as.POSIXct(paste(location$date, location$time), 
                                 format="%m/%d/%Y %H:%M")

And the same for weather

Then for each value of date.time in location, find the entry in weather that has the lowest absolute values for the time differences:

 sapply(location$dt.time, function(x) which.min(abs(difftime(x, weather$dt.time))))
# [1] 2 3 8 9
 cbind(location, weather[ sapply(location$dt.time, 
                      function(x) which.min(abs(difftime(x, weather$dt.time)))), ])

  x y       date  time             dt.time       date  time temp wind             dt.time
2 1 3 01/02/2003 18:00 2003-01-02 18:00:00 01/02/2003 16:34   10   16 2003-01-02 16:34:00
3 2 3 01/02/2003 19:00 2003-01-02 19:00:00 01/02/2003 20:55   14   22 2003-01-02 20:55:00
8 3 4 01/03/2003 23:00 2003-01-03 23:00:00 01/03/2003 23:44    2   33 2003-01-03 23:44:00
9 2 5 01/04/2003 02:00 2003-01-04 02:00:00 01/04/2003 01:55    6   22 2003-01-04 01:55:00

 cbind(location, weather[ 
                  sapply(location$dt.time, 
                    function(x) which.min(abs(difftime(x, weather$dt.time)))), ])[ #pick columns
                          c(1,2,5,8,9,10)]

  x y             dt.time temp wind           dt.time.1
2 1 3 2003-01-02 18:00:00   10   16 2003-01-02 16:34:00
3 2 3 2003-01-02 19:00:00   14   22 2003-01-02 20:55:00
8 3 4 2003-01-03 23:00:00    2   33 2003-01-03 23:44:00
9 2 5 2003-01-04 02:00:00    6   22 2003-01-04 01:55:00

My answers seem a bit different than yours but another reader has already questioned your abilities to do the matching properly by hand.