On this R-data statistics page, you will find information about the sunspot.month data set which pertains to Monthly Sunspot Data, from 1749 to "Present". The sunspot.month data set is found in the datasets R package. You can load the sunspot.month data set in R by issuing the following command at the console data("sunspot.month"). This will load the data into a variable called sunspot.month. If R says the sunspot.month data set is not found, you can try installing the package by issuing this command install.packages("datasets") and then attempt to reload the data. If you need to download R, you can go to the R project website. You can download a CSV (comma separated values) version of the sunspot.month R data set. The size of this file is about 58,132 bytes.

Monthly Sunspot Data, from 1749 to "Present"

Description

Monthly numbers of sunspots, as from the World Data Center, aka SIDC. This is the version of the data that will occasionally be updated when new counts become available.

Usage

sunspot.month

Format

The univariate time series sunspot.year and sunspot.month contain 289 and 2988 observations, respectively. The objects are of class "ts".

Author(s)

R

Source

WDC-SILSO, Solar Influences Data Analysis Center (SIDC), Royal Observatory of Belgium, Av. Circulaire, 3, B-1180 BRUSSELS Currently at http://www.sidc.be/silso/datafiles

See Also

sunspot.month is a longer version of sunspots; the latter runs until 1983 and is kept fixed (for reproducibility as example dataset).

Examples

require(stats); require(graphics)
## Compare the monthly series
plot (sunspot.month,
      main="sunspot.month & sunspots [package'datasets']", col=2)
lines(sunspots) # -> faint differences where they overlap## Now look at the difference :
all(tsp(sunspots)     [c(1,3)] ==
    tsp(sunspot.month)[c(1,3)]) ## Start & Periodicity are the same
n1 <- length(sunspots)
table(eq <- sunspots == sunspot.month[1:n1]) #>  132  are different !
i <- which(!eq)
rug(time(eq)[i])
s1 <- sunspots[i] ; s2 <- sunspot.month[i]
cbind(i = i, time = time(sunspots)[i], sunspots = s1, ss.month = s2,
      perc.diff = round(100*2*abs(s1-s2)/(s1+s2), 1))## How to recreate the "old" sunspot.month (R <= 3.0.3):
.sunspot.diff <- cbind(
    i = c(1202L, 1256L, 1258L, 1301L, 1407L, 1429L, 1452L, 1455L,
          1663L, 2151L, 2329L, 2498L, 2594L, 2694L, 2819L),
    res10 = c(1L, 1L, 1L, -1L, -1L, -1L, 1L, -1L,
          1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 20L, 1L))
ssm0 <- sunspot.month[1:2988]
with(as.data.frame(.sunspot.diff), ssm0[i] <<- ssm0[i] - res10/10)
sunspot.month.0 <- ts(ssm0, start = 1749, frequency = 12)

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Dataset imported from https://www.r-project.org.