This analysis explores the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Storm Database from 1950 to November 2011 to identify which types of events are most harmful to population health and which have the greatest economic consequences. The dataset includes information on event types, dates, fatalities, injuries, property damage, and crop damage. To ensure reproducibility, the analysis starts with the raw compressed CSV file and all data transformations are documented in this report. Minimal normalization of event types (EVTYPE) was applied to reduce common duplicates, and property and crop damages were converted to U.S. dollars using the provided damage exponent codes.

Results show that Tornadoes are by far the most harmful event type to population health, causing the highest number of combined injuries and fatalities. Excessive Heat, Thunderstorm Winds, Floods, and Lightning also contribute significantly to health impacts. In terms of economic consequences, Floods cause the greatest overall financial damage, followed closely by Hurricanes/Typhoons and Storm Surges. Droughts represent the largest contributor to crop-related losses, while Tornadoes and Hail also cause major property damage.

Overall, the findings highlight the importance of tornadoes for public health preparedness and floods and hurricanes for economic risk planning. All results are fully reproducible, and the complete R code and figures are included in this document.

R Markdown

This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com.

When you click the Knit button a document will be generated that includes both content as well as the output of any embedded R code chunks within the document. You can embed an R code chunk like this:

summary(cars)
##      speed           dist       
##  Min.   : 4.0   Min.   :  2.00  
##  1st Qu.:12.0   1st Qu.: 26.00  
##  Median :15.0   Median : 36.00  
##  Mean   :15.4   Mean   : 42.98  
##  3rd Qu.:19.0   3rd Qu.: 56.00  
##  Max.   :25.0   Max.   :120.00

Including Plots

You can also embed plots, for example:

Note that the echo = FALSE parameter was added to the code chunk to prevent printing of the R code that generated the plot.