Deleting temporary files from memory

The contents of this post fall squarely within the category of things I’d forget if I didn’t write them down. Recently I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I was computing 144 months worth of exposure to pollution from coal-fired power plants for every single 10 square-km pixel over land in India. This can be done rather painlessly in R using the sf (simple features) and terra packages. Still, with the amounts of data being processed, storage and RAM can run low....

March 19, 2026 · 2 min · Mathias Weidinger