Impact of Severe Weather Events on Public Health and Economy in the U.S.

Synopsis

This report analyzes the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) storm database to determine which weather events are most harmful to population health and which cause the greatest economic consequences. The data span from 1950 to November 2011 and include information on injuries, fatalities, and property/crop damage. The analysis includes data cleaning, summarization, and visualization. The results show that tornadoes have the most severe impact on public health, while floods lead to the greatest economic damages. All analysis and processing are performed using R and are fully reproducible.

Data Processing

# Load required packages
library(dplyr)

## Warning: package 'dplyr' was built under R version 4.4.3

## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'

## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter, lag

## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
## 
##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

library(ggplot2)

## Warning: package 'ggplot2' was built under R version 4.4.3

library(scales)

## Warning: package 'scales' was built under R version 4.4.3