Precipitation

There are a number of gridded precipitation databases, but this CDC provides gridded high spatial resolution daily precipitation in mm units.

library(raster)
library(spnc)

# note the transform from [-180,180] to [0,360] longitude
BB <-  spnc::to360BB(c(-72,-63,39,46))

# connect to the OpenDAP resource
ff <- 'http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/thredds/dodsC/Datasets/cpc_us_precip/RT/precip.V1.0.2015.nc'
X <- SPNC(ff)

# get the precip for the first 5 days 
r <- X$get_raster(bb = BB, time = 1:5)

# show them
spplot(r)