Infer the temporal resolution of a set of time steps

Reads the resolution off the time steps actually present: more than one day within any month means daily data, and more than one month within any year means monthly data.

Usage

detect_temporal_resolution(x)

Arguments

x

an object with YEAR/MONTH/DAY columns, typically the source side of a match

Value

one of "day", "month", or "year"

Details

A single time step per year is genuinely ambiguous - it looks the same whether the data is annual, or monthly but subset to one month. Annual is inferred only with positive evidence for it: several years present, each stamped on the same single month, as annual products conventionally are. Everything else falls back to monthly, because guessing too coarse is the more damaging error - it silently matches observations to a time step from a different month, whereas guessing too fine leaves them unmatched and warns. Pass temporal_resolution explicitly to override.