The NOAA Disaster App

David Seibel
Feb 18, 2015

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a federal agency focused on the condition of the oceans and the atmosphere. The NOAA database started recording tornado data in 1950 and in 1993 added other types of natural disasters. Link below.

http://seibeldb.shinyapps.io/Project1

The NOAA Disaster App displays the most significant 1000 natural disasters based on three criteria: economic damage, fatalities and injuries. The top 1000 items were gathered for each criteria resulting in a set of 3000 items and the overlapping duplicates were removed leaving 2396 rows of data.

The App displays data in a dynamic table that provides:

  • Filtering by State and Event Type (drop down box)
  • Calculates the number of fatalities and injuries based on the filter
  • Full text searching (e.g. Katrina)
  • Column searches (at the bottom of the page) and column sorting
  • Paging though the data with selectable rows per page.

Data Dictionary

  • STATE
  • EVTYPE - Event Type (e.g. Tornado)
  • FATALITIES
  • INJURIES
  • date - Beginning date of the event
  • prop.dollars - Damage to property in millions of dollars
  • crop.dollars - Damage to crops in millions of dollars
  • m.of.dollars - Total Damage to property and crops
  • remarks - Remarks from NOAA can be a paragraph or more, so only the first sentence is displayed.

Fun Things to do:

  • Look up your home state.
  • Find information about a natural disaster that your family experienced.
  • Search for the Chicago Heat Wave, Katrina, Ice Storms, etc.
  • Find the event with the largest economic or health impact.
  • Copy the date and remarks into a Google search bar.
  • You'll find some amazing stories and videos.

Data Issues

  • The NOAA database after 1992 contains some repetitious rows. For example there are serveral enties for hurricane Katrina and some report similar economic damage, thus totals of economic damage would be unrealistically high. Also some entries have an incorrect magnitude (e.g. billions versus millions).
  • This type of problem does not seem to affect fatality or injury counts.
  • Event type names are not always used consistently
  • Large natural disasters have items from multiple regions and states