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Timezones in the weather data

Did you ever notice that in the hourly Auckland weather data there was another datetime column, date_utc? Take a look:

tibble::glimpse(akl_hourly)

The datetime column you created represented local time in Auckland, NZ. I suspect this additional column, date_utc represents the observation time in UTC (the name seems a big clue). But does it really?

Use your new timezone skills to find out.

This exercise is part of the course

Working with Dates and Times in R

View Course

Exercise instructions

The data is available in the akl_hourly data frame.

  • What timezone are datetime and date_utc currently in? Examine the head of the datetime and date_utc columns to find out.
  • Fix datetime to have the timezone for "Pacific/Auckland".
  • Reexamine the head of the datetime column to check the times have the same clocktime, but are now in the right timezone.
  • Now tabulate up the difference between the datetime and date_utc columns. It should be zero if our hypothesis was correct.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Examine datetime and date_utc columns
head(___)
head(___)
  
# Force datetime to Pacific/Auckland
akl_hourly <- akl_hourly %>%
  mutate(
    datetime = ___(datetime, tzone = ___))

# Reexamine datetime
head(___)
  
# Are datetime and date_utc the same moments
table(___ - ___)
  
Edit and Run Code