Determine season from Date using lubridate in R

Question

I have a very big dataset with a DateTime Column containing POSIXct-Values. I need to determine the season (Winter - Summer) based on the DateTime

Answer 1

I packaged @Lars Arne Jordanger's much more elegant approach into a function:

getTwoSeasons <- function(input.date){
  numeric.date <- 100*month(input.date)+day(input.date)
  ## input Seasons upper limits in the form MMDD in the "break =" option:
  cuts <- base::cut(numeric.date, breaks = c(0,415,1015,1231)) 
  # rename the resulting groups (could've been done within cut(...levels=) if "Winter" wasn't double
  levels(cuts) <- c("Winter", "Summer","Winter")
  return(cuts)
}

Testing it on some sample data seems to work fine:

getTwoSeasons(as.POSIXct("2016-01-01 12:00:00")+(0:365)*(60*60*24))