hurricNamedR Documentation

Named US Atlantic Hurricanes

Description

Details are given of atmospheric pressure at landfall, estimated damage in millions of dollars, and deaths, for named hurricanes that made landfall in the US mainland from 1950 through to 2012.

Usage

data("hurricNamed")

Format

A data frame with 94 observations on the following 11 variables.

Name

Hurricane name

Year

Numeric

LF.WindsMPH

Maximum sustained windspeed (>= 1 minute) to occur along the US coast. Prior to 1980, this is estimated from the maximum windspeed associated with the Saffir-Simpson index at landfall. If 2 or more landfalls, the maximum is taken

LF.PressureMB

Atmospheric pressure at landfall in millibars. If 2 or more landfalls, the minimum is taken

LF.times

Date of first landfall

BaseDam2014

Property damage (millions of 2014 US dollars)

BaseDamage

Property damage (in millions of dollars for that year)

NDAM2014

Damage, had hurricane appeared in 2014

AffectedStates

Affected states (2-digit abbreviations), pasted together

firstLF

Date of first landfall

deaths

Number of continental US direct and indirect deaths

mf

Gender of name; a factor with levels f m

Details

An earlier version of these data was the subject of a controversial paper that claimed to have found that hurricanes with female names, presumably because taken less seriously, did more human damage after adjusting for the severity of the storm than those with male names.

Source

https://www.icat.com/storms/catastrophe-resources Deaths except for Audrey and Katrina, are in the Excel file that is available from https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1402786111

NOAA Monthly Weather Reports (MWRs) supplied the numbers of deaths for all except Donna, Celia, Audrey and Katrina. The figure for Celia is from https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/NWS-TPC-5.pdf. For the other three hurricanes, it is from the Atlantic hurricane list in Wikipedia (see the references.)

References

https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/mwr_pdf/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlantic_hurricanes https://www.nhtsa.gov/file-downloads

Jung, Kiju, et al. "Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.24 (2014): 8782-8787.

Examples

data(hurricNamed)
str(hurricNamed)
plot(log(deaths+0.5) ~ log(NDAM2014), data=hurricNamed)
with(hurricNamed, lines(lowess(log(deaths+0.5) ~ log(NDAM2014))))
plot(log(deaths+0.5) ~ I(NDAM2014^0.14), data=hurricNamed)
with(hurricNamed, lines(lowess(log(deaths+0.1) ~ I(NDAM2014^0.14))))