Package overview

This package allows users to explore and map data of county-level exposures to Atlantic-basin tropical storms between 1988 and 2018 for a number of storm hazards (e.g., wind, rain, flood events, distance from the storm track) for counties in the eastern half of the United States. Users can map exposures by county for a selected storm and can also identify all storms to which selected counties were exposed, based on user-specified thresholds (for example, the package allows the user to identify all storms that brought wind of 34 knots or higher to Miami-Dade County in Florida).

If you use this package and the data in the associated data package (hurricaneexposuredata) for research, please cite both packages. In particular, be sure to include the version of the packages that you used, as this will make your research project more reproducible, and the data will likely be updated as we get further years of data and find improved ways to measure tropical storm exposure. The two packages can be cited as:

Anderson B, Yan M, Ferreri J, Crosson W, Al-Hamdan M, Schumacher A and Eddelbuettel D (2020). hurricaneexposure: Explore and Map County-Level Hurricane Exposure in the United States. R package version 0.1.1, <URL: http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=hurricaneexposure>.
Anderson B, Schumacher A, Crosson W, Al-Hamdan M, Yan M, Ferreri J, Chen Z, Quiring S and Guikema S (2020). hurricaneexposuredata: Data Characterizing Exposure to Hurricanes in United States Counties. R package version 0.1.0, <URL: https://github.com/geanders/hurricaneexposuredata>.

To generate BibTex entries for the packages, you can use the citation function in R.

Required set-up to use this package

This package depends on data in a data package (hurricaneexposuredata) that is available through a drat repository on GitHub. To use the hurricaneexposure package, you will need to install hurricaneexposuredata on your computer. You can do that by adding the drat archive to the list of repositories your system will query when adding and updating R packages. Once you do this, you can install the hurricaneexposuredata using the install.packages function (and later update it using the update.packages function):

library(drat)
addRepo("geanders")
install.packages("hurricaneexposuredata")

You will want to have the latest version of the hurricaneexposuredata package. If you have previously installed hurricaneexposuredata, you may need to re-run the above code if you update the hurricaneexposure package, to update to the latest data.

The hurricaneexposuredata data package includes data that characterizes county-level exposure to tropical storms in counties in the eastern half of the United States between 1988 and 2015 (for some hazards, exposure data is only included for a subset of these years). Tropical storms that did not pass within at least 250 km of at least one US county were excluded from these datasets. The following datasets are included with the hurricaneexposuredata data package:

county_centers: Location of United States county centers of population
hurr_tracks: Storm tracks for Atlantic-basin storms, 1988-2018
closest_dist: Closest distances between counties and a storm track, for Atlantic-basin storms, 1988-2018
rain: Rainfall for US counties during Atlantic basin tropical storms, 1988-2011; daily rainfall is given from five days before to three days after the storm’s closest approach to the county
storm_winds: Modeled county wind speeds for Atlantic-basin storms, 1988-2018
storm_events: Listings from the NOAA Storm Events database that occurred near in time and location to tropical storms, 1988-2018. This database changed the types of events it reported in 1996, which should be considered when using the data.
ext_tracks_wind: Estimated county wind speeds for Atlantic-basin storms, 1988-2018, based on the wind radii listed in HURDAT2

Once you’ve installed and loaded hurricaneexposuredata, you can load the included data using the data function. For example, you can access the data on hurricane tracks (hurr_tracks) using:

library(hurricaneexposuredata)
data("hurr_tracks")
head(hurr_tracks)
#> # A tibble: 6 x 6
#>   storm_id     usa_atcf_id date         latitude longitude  wind
#>   <chr>        <chr>       <chr>           <dbl>     <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 Alberto-1988 AL011988    198808051800     32       -77.5    20
#> 2 Alberto-1988 AL011988    198808060000     32.8     -76.2    20
#> 3 Alberto-1988 AL011988    198808060600     34       -75.2    20
#> 4 Alberto-1988 AL011988    198808061200     35.2     -74.6    25
#> 5 Alberto-1988 AL011988    198808061800     37       -73.5    25
#> 6 Alberto-1988 AL011988    198808070000     38.7     -72.4    25

For each dataset included in hurricaneexposuredata, you can see the helpfiles for the data for more information (e.g., ?hurr_tracks to read documentation on the hurricane tracks data shown above). This data documentation includes both explanations of how the dataset was created, definitions of the variables included in each dataset, and the sources of data included.

The following table shows the storms covered by the hurricaneexposuredata data package, as well as which hazard metrics are available for each year. All storms passed within 250 km of at least one U.S. county.

| Year | Storms | Distance | Wind | Rain | Flood | Tornado | | :--: | :----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | :------: | :--: | :--: | :---: | :-----: | | 1988 | Alberto, Beryl, Chris, Florence, Gilbert, Keith, AL13, AL14, AL17 | x | x | x | | x | | 1989 | Allison, Chantal, Hugo, Jerry | x | x | x | | x | | 1990 | AL01, Bertha, Marco | x | x | x | | x | | 1991 | Ana, Bob, Fabian, AL12 | x | x | x | | x | | 1992 | AL02, Andrew, Danielle, Earl | x | x | x | | x | | 1993 | AL01, Arlene, Emily | x | x | x | | x | | 1994 | Alberto, AL02, Beryl, Gordon | x | x | x | | x | | 1995 | Allison, Dean, Erin, Gabrielle, Jerry, Opal | x | x | x | | x | | 1996 | Arthur, Bertha, Edouard, Fran, Josephine | x | x | x | x | x | | 1997 | AL01, Ana, Danny | x | x | x | x | x | | 1998 | Bonnie, Charley, Earl, Frances, Georges, Hermine, Mitch | x | x | x | x | x | | 1999 | Bret, Dennis, AL07, Floyd, Harvey, Irene | x | x | x | x | x | | 2000 | AL04, Beryl, AL09, Gordon, Helene, Leslie | x | x | x | x | x | | 2001 | Allison, Barry, Gabrielle, Karen, Michelle | x | x | x | x | x | | 2002 | Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Edouard, Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Isidore, Kyle, Lili | x | x | x | x | x | | 2003 | Bill, Claudette, AL07, Erika, Grace, Henri, Isabel | x | x | x | x | x | | 2004 | Alex, Bonnie, Charley, Frances, Gaston, Hermine, Ivan, Jeanne, Matthew | x | x | x | x | x | | 2005 | Arlene, Cindy, Dennis, Emily, Katrina, Ophelia, Rita, Tammy, Twenty-Two, Wilma | x | x | x | x | x | | 2006 | Alberto, Beryl, Chris, Ernesto | x | x | x | x | x | | 2007 | Andrea, Barry, Erin, Gabrielle, Humberto, Ten, Noel | x | x | x | x | x | | 2008 | Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike, Kyle, Paloma | x | x | x | x | x | | 2009 | One, Claudette, Ida | x | x | x | x | x | | 2010 | Alex, Two, Bonnie, Five, Earl, Hermine, Nicole, Paula | x | x | x | x | x | | 2011 | Bret, Don, Emily, Irene, Lee | x | x | x | x | x | | 2012 | Alberto, Beryl, Debby, Isaac, Sandy | x | x | | x | x | | 2013 | Andrea, Dorian, Karen | x | x | | x | x | | 2014 | Arthur | x | x | | x | x | | 2015 | Ana, Bill, Claudette | x | x | | x | x | | 2016 | Bonnie, Colin, Eight, Hermine, Julia, Matthew | x | x | | x | x | | 2017 | Cindy, Emily, Harvey, Irma, Jose, Nate, Philippe | x | x | | x | x | | 2018 | Alberto, Chris, Florence, Gordon, Michael

Hurricaneexposure

Install / Use

README

Package overview

Required set-up to use this package