Selecting Rows which contain daily max value in R

Question

So I want to subset my data frame to select rows with a daily maximum value.

Site    Year   Day     Time      Cover       Size TempChange
 ST1    2011    97      0.0     Closed      small       0.97
 ST1    2011    97      0.5     Closed      small       1.02
 ST1    2011    97      1.0     Closed      small       1.10

Section of data frame is above. I would like to select only the rows which have the maximum value of the variable TempChange for each variable Day. I want to do this because I am interested in specific variables (not shown) for these particular times.

AMENDED EXAMPLE AND REQUIRED OUTPUT

Site  Day   Temp     Row
a     10    0.2     1
a     10    0.3     2
a     11    0.5     3
a     11    0.4     4
b     10    0.1     5
b     10    0.8     6
b     11    0.7     7
b     11    0.6     8
c     10    0.2     9
c     10    0.3     10
c     11    0.5     11
c     11    0.8     12

REQUIRED OUTPUT

Site  Day   Temp     Row
a     10    0.3     2
a     11    0.5     3
b     10    0.8     6
b     11    0.7     7
c     10    0.3     10
c     11    0.8     12

Hope that makes it clearer.

Answer 1

After faffing with raw data frame code, I realised plyr could do this in one:

> df
  Day          V Z
1  97 0.26575207 1
2  97 0.09443351 2
3  97 0.88097858 3
4  98 0.62241515 4
5  98 0.61985937 5
6  99 0.06956219 6
7 100 0.86638108 7
8 100 0.08382254 8

> ddply(df,~Day,function(x){x[which.max(x$V),]})
  Day          V Z
1  97 0.88097858 3
2  98 0.62241515 4
3  99 0.06956219 6
4 100 0.86638108 7

To get the rows for max values for unique combinations of more than one column, just add the variable to the formula. For your modified example, its then:

> df
   Site Day Temp Row
1     a  10  0.2   1
2     a  10  0.3   2
3     a  11  0.5   3
4     a  11  0.4   4
5     b  10  0.1   5
6     b  10  0.8   6
7     b  11  0.7   7
8     b  11  0.6   8
9     c  10  0.2   9
10    c  10  0.3  10
11    c  11  0.5  11
12    c  11  0.8  12
> ddply(df,~Day+Site,function(x){x[which.max(x$Temp),]})
  Site Day Temp Row
1    a  10  0.3   2
2    b  10  0.8   6
3    c  10  0.3  10
4    a  11  0.5   3
5    b  11  0.7   7
6    c  11  0.8  12

Note this isn't in the same order as your original dataframe, but you can fix that.

> dmax = ddply(df,~Day+Site,function(x){x[which.max(x$Temp),]})
> dmax[order(dmax$Row),]
  Site Day Temp Row
1    a  10  0.3   2
4    a  11  0.5   3
2    b  10  0.8   6
5    b  11  0.7   7
3    c  10  0.3  10
6    c  11  0.8  12