通过R / Python中两个不匹配的不规则时间序列来排列两个变量？

Question

I have date/time hourly that gives stream discharge and date/time on the hour at irregular intervals that gives stream sediment concentration. I'm unsure how to post data frames here, but it looks like:

 Datetimedis, Discharge, Datetimesed, Sediment
6/12/15 12:00  1.1 6/12/15 18:00  1231
6/12/15 13:00  113 6/13/15 1:00 12312
6/12/15 14:00  123 21 6/13/15 8:00 12321
6/12/15 15:00  12 6/13/15 15:00 12312
6/12/15 16:00  12 6/14/15 19:00 4324
6/12/15 17:00  23 6/15/15 2:00 534523
6/12/15 18:00  123 6/15/15 9:00 52341

etc

I have ~2500 raws of data for the discharge, and ~500 columns for sediment. Is there any way to use ddply or an R package or python to paste the values of sediment next to the discharge value that corresponds to the same time?

In this example data, I would want for instance the sediment value at 6/12/15 18:00 to paste next to the discharge value at that time.

I need to paste them there with the space in-between containing NA values or empty values so that I can later interpolate them.

Answer 1

Assuming you have one dataframe with the datetime and discharge(df) and another with the time and sediment concentration(df2) you could do the following with python pandas ...

create a new column with the time from Datetime in df:

 df['hours'] = df.index.hour

then use the map function from pandas to map the sediment concentration in df2 to df:

df['Sediment']=df['hours'].map(df2)

Answer 2

I figured it out using the zoo package!

For anyone in the future who uses this as reference, I split up the two separate date and value entries into separate data frames, d1 and d2.

zoo1 <- read.zoo(d1, header=TRUE)
zoo2 <- read.zoo(d2, header=TRUE)
zoomerge <- merge(d1, d2)

worked perfectly!