Consequences of Different Weather Events on Population Health and Economic in USA between 1950 and 2011
This is an educational project, which is the part of Data Science Specialization provided by Johns Hopkins University on Coursera.
You can find published results of this study on Rpubs.
Or you can explore it here: Report
Storms and other severe weather events can cause both public health and economic problems for communities and municipalities. Many severe events can result in fatalities, injuries, and property damage, and preventing such outcomes to the extent possible is a key concern.
This project involves exploring the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) storm database. This database tracks characteristics of major storms and weather events in the United States, including when and where they occur, as well as estimates of any fatalities, injuries, and property damage.
The data for this assignment was kindly provided by Coursera. It comes in the form of a comma-separated-value file compressed via the bzip2 algorithm to reduce its size. You can download the file from the Coursera web site:
- Storm Data 47Mb
There is also some documentation of the database available. Here you will find how some of the variables are constructed/defined.
The events in the database start in the year 1950 and end in November 2011. In the earlier years of the database there are generally fewer events recorded, most likely due to a lack of good records. More recent years should be considered more complete.
The basic goal of this study is to explore the NOAA Storm Database and answer some basic questions about severe weather events:
- Across the United States, which types of events are most harmful with respect to population health?
- Across the United States, which types of events have the greatest economic consequences?