Synopsis
Weather events are often thought of as some of the most fickle, yet unavoidable realities of living on this earth. Weather can bring joy and prosperity to the world, but also tragedy and destruction. Having a greater understanding of which events contribute to the latter may prove to be beneficial when determining what to expect and how to properly anticipate the implications of such events. In this analysis, I analyzed data from the U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s storm database spanning from the years 1950 to 2011 in order to answer two main questions:
1. Which events are most harmful to population health? 2. Which types of events have the greatest economic consequences?
After transforming and aggregating the data into analyzable formats, I created two tables that helped to answer the questions at hand. Through my analysis, I found that: tornadoes, by far, account for the largest amounts of deaths and injuries to the US population, while flooding and hurricanes account for the highest amount of damages to property and crops. The rest of this document details the entire process of the analysis as well as the entirely of the code used.
Complete Writeup
Click here to view the full RPubs writeup/report for this project containing all of the included code and the complete analysis process along with data transformation steps.
Quick Summary / Findings
Below is a quick summary detailing the findings of the analysis along with the final two tables that were created and coded in R using the gtExtras package.
1. Which events are most harmful to population health?
Tornadoes take the #1 spot of being the most fatal and destructive weather events by a large margin. Excessive heat takes the #2 spot with regard to fatalities, followed by flooding and more heat. As far as injuries go, things such as thunderstorm winds, floods, and excessive heat are culpable for thousands of injuries, yet none of them come close to tornadoes.
2. Which types of events have the greatest economic consequences?
Flooding easily takes the #1 spot of being the most costly weather event to property and crops at an astounding $150 billion worth of damages, making up ~31% of all weather-related damages. Hurricanes/typhoons take the #2 spot with a share of ~15% of all damages, and Tornadoes a close third at ~12%.