Reproducible Research: Peer Assessment 2
Fabio Araujo
21 de Outubro de 2015
Impact of Severe Weather Events on Public Health and Economy in the United States
Synonpsis
The assignment goal is to explore the NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s) Storm Database and answer questions about severe weather events.
Across the United States, which types of events (as indicated in the EVTYPE variable) the most harmful with respect to population health are excessive heat and tornado.
For the point of the greatest economic consequences, flood, drought, and hurricane/typhoon have the greatest consequences.
Basic settings
Libraries.
echo = TRUE # Always make code visible
options(scipen = 1) # Turn off scientific notations for numbers
library(R.utils)## Loading required package: R.oo
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## cat, commandArgs, getOption, inherits, isOpen, parse, warningslibrary(ggplot2)
library(plyr)
require(gridExtra)## Loading required package: gridExtraData Processing
Downloading.
Read the generated csv bz2 file.
## [1] 902297 37## STATE__ BGN_DATE BGN_TIME TIME_ZONE COUNTY COUNTYNAME STATE
## 1 1 4/18/1950 0:00:00 0130 CST 97 MOBILE AL
## 2 1 4/18/1950 0:00:00 0145 CST 3 BALDWIN AL
## EVTYPE BGN_RANGE BGN_AZI BGN_LOCATI END_DATE END_TIME COUNTY_END
## 1 TORNADO 0 0
## 2 TORNADO 0 0
## COUNTYENDN END_RANGE END_AZI END_LOCATI LENGTH WIDTH F MAG FATALITIES
## 1 NA 0 14 100 3 0 0
## 2 NA 0 2 150 2 0 0
## INJURIES PROPDMG PROPDMGEXP CROPDMG CROPDMGEXP WFO STATEOFFIC ZONENAMES
## 1 15 25.0 K 0
## 2 0 2.5 K 0
## LATITUDE LONGITUDE LATITUDE_E LONGITUDE_ REMARKS REFNUM
## 1 3040 8812 3051 8806 1
## 2 3042 8755 0 0 2There are 90.2297 rows and 37 columns. The events start in the year 1950 and end in 2011.
The best data record starts in 1995, based on the above histogram. So, we subset from 1990 to 2011.
## [1] 681500 38Now, there are 681.500 rows and 38 colummn in total.
Impact on Public Health
From here we check the number of fatalities and injuries that are caused by the severe weather events raking the top 15 most severe types of weather events.
Impact on Economy
It needs to be converted the property and crop damages data into comparable numerical forms. Both PROPDMGEXP and CROPDMGEXP columns record a multiplier for each observation where we have Hundred (H), Thousand (K), Million (M) and Billion (B).
## Warning in Convert(StormData, "PROPDMGEXP", "propertyDamage"): NAs
## introduzidos por coerção## Warning in Convert(StormData, "CROPDMGEXP", "cropDamage"): NAs introduzidos
## por coerção## [1] "STATE__" "BGN_DATE" "BGN_TIME" "TIME_ZONE"
## [5] "COUNTY" "COUNTYNAME" "STATE" "EVTYPE"
## [9] "BGN_RANGE" "BGN_AZI" "BGN_LOCATI" "END_DATE"
## [13] "END_TIME" "COUNTY_END" "COUNTYENDN" "END_RANGE"
## [17] "END_AZI" "END_LOCATI" "LENGTH" "WIDTH"
## [21] "F" "MAG" "FATALITIES" "INJURIES"
## [25] "PROPDMG" "PROPDMGEXP" "CROPDMG" "CROPDMGEXP"
## [29] "WFO" "STATEOFFIC" "ZONENAMES" "LATITUDE"
## [33] "LONGITUDE" "LATITUDE_E" "LONGITUDE_" "REMARKS"
## [37] "REFNUM" "year" "propertyDamage" "cropDamage"Results
The impact on public health are sorted on two lists of severe weather events below by the number of people badly affected
## EVTYPE FATALITIES
## 1 EXCESSIVE HEAT 1903
## 2 TORNADO 1545
## 3 FLASH FLOOD 934
## 4 HEAT 924
## 5 LIGHTNING 729
## 6 FLOOD 423
## 7 RIP CURRENT 360
## 8 HIGH WIND 241
## 9 TSTM WIND 241
## 10 AVALANCHE 223
## 11 RIP CURRENTS 204
## 12 WINTER STORM 195
## 13 HEAT WAVE 161
## 14 THUNDERSTORM WIND 131
## 15 EXTREME COLD 126## EVTYPE INJURIES
## 1 TORNADO 21765
## 2 FLOOD 6769
## 3 EXCESSIVE HEAT 6525
## 4 LIGHTNING 4631
## 5 TSTM WIND 3630
## 6 HEAT 2030
## 7 FLASH FLOOD 1734
## 8 THUNDERSTORM WIND 1426
## 9 WINTER STORM 1298
## 10 HURRICANE/TYPHOON 1275
## 11 HIGH WIND 1093
## 12 HAIL 916
## 13 WILDFIRE 911
## 14 HEAVY SNOW 751
## 15 FOG 718And following are a pair of graphs of total fatalities and total injuries.
Based on the above histograms, we find that excessive heat and tornado cause most fatalities. Tornado causes most injuries.
Below we have two sorted lists about the amount of money cost by damages (Economic Impact).
## EVTYPE propertyDamage
## 1 FLOOD 144022037057
## 2 HURRICANE/TYPHOON 69305840000
## 3 STORM SURGE 43193536000
## 4 TORNADO 24935939545
## 5 FLASH FLOOD 16047794571
## 6 HAIL 15048722103
## 7 HURRICANE 11812819010
## 8 TROPICAL STORM 7653335550
## 9 HIGH WIND 5259785375
## 10 WILDFIRE 4759064000
## 11 STORM SURGE/TIDE 4641188000
## 12 TSTM WIND 4482361440
## 13 ICE STORM 3643555810
## 14 THUNDERSTORM WIND 3399282992
## 15 HURRICANE OPAL 3172846000## EVTYPE cropDamage
## 1 DROUGHT 13922066000
## 2 FLOOD 5422810400
## 3 HURRICANE 2741410000
## 4 HAIL 2614127070
## 5 HURRICANE/TYPHOON 2607872800
## 6 FLASH FLOOD 1343915000
## 7 EXTREME COLD 1292473000
## 8 FROST/FREEZE 1094086000
## 9 HEAVY RAIN 728399800
## 10 TROPICAL STORM 677836000
## 11 HIGH WIND 633561300
## 12 TSTM WIND 553947350
## 13 EXCESSIVE HEAT 492402000
## 14 THUNDERSTORM WIND 414354000
## 15 HEAT 401411500And the following is a pair of graphs of total property damage and total crop damage.
Flood and hurricane/typhoon cause most property damage; drought and flood causes most crop damage, based on the above histograms.
Conclusion
From these data, we found that excessive heat and tornado are most harmful with respect to population health, while flood, drought, and hurricane/typhoon have the greatest economic consequences.