match_forecast_county: Match events by forecast zone to county

In noaastormevents: Explore NOAA Storm Events Database

Description

For events reported by forecast zone, use regular expressions to match as many as possible to counties.

Usage

match_forecast_county(storm_data_z)

Arguments

storm_data_z

A dataframe of storm events reported by forecast zone (i.e., cz_type == "Z") rather than county. This dataframe should include the columns: state: State name, in lowercase cz_name: Location name, in lowercase cz_fips: Forecast zone FIPS

Details

This function tries to match the cz_name of each event to a state and county name from the county.fips dataframe that comes with the maps package. The following steps are taken to try to match each cz_name to a state and county name from county.fips:

1. Tries to match cz_name to the county name in county.fips after removing any periods or apostrophes in cz_name.

2. Next, for county names with "county" in them, try to match the word before "county" to county name in county.fips. Then check the two words before "county", then the one and two words before "counties".

3. Next, pull out the last word in cz_name and try to match it to the county name in county.fips. The check the last two words in cz_name, then check the last three words in cz_name.

4. Next, pull any words right before a slash and check that against the county name.

5. Finally, try removing anything in parentheses in cz_name before matching.

Value

The dataframe of events input to the function, with county FIPS added for events matched to a county in the fips column. Events that could not be matched are kept in the dataframe, but the fips code is set to NA.

Note

This function does not provide any matches for events outside of the continental U.S.

You may want to hand-check that event listings with names like "Lake", "Mountain", and "Park" have not been unintentionally linked to a county like "Lake County". While such examples seem rare in the example data used to develop this function (NOAA Storm Events for 2015), it can sometimes happen. To do so, you can use the str_detect function from the stringr package.

Examples

counties_to_parse <- dplyr::data_frame(
           event_id = c(1:19),
           cz_name = c("Suffolk",
                       "Eastern Greenbrier",
                       "Ventura County Mountains",
                       "Central And Southeast Montgomery",
                       "Western Cape May",
                       "San Diego County Coastal Areas",
                       "Blount/Smoky Mountains",
                       "St. Mary's",
                       "Central & Eastern Lake County",
                       "Mountains Southwest Shasta County To Northern Lake County",
                       "Kings (Brooklyn)",
                       "Lower Bucks",
                       "Central St. Louis",
                       "Curry County Coast",
                       "Lincoln County Except The Sheep Range",
                       "Shasta Lake/North Shasta County",
                       "Coastal Palm Beach County",
                       "Larimer & Boulder Counties Between 6000 & 9000 Feet",
                       "Yellowstone National Park"),
          state = c("Virginia",
                    "West Virginia",
                    "California",
                    "Maryland",
                    "New Jersey",
                    "California",
                    "Tennessee",
                    "Maryland",
                    "Oregon",
                    "California",
                    "New York",
                    "Pennsylvania",
                    "Minnesota",
                    "Oregon",
                    "Nevada",
                    "California",
                    "Florida",
                    "Colorado",
                    "Wyoming"))
match_forecast_county(counties_to_parse)

noaastormevents documentation built on Jan. 21, 2021, 5:11 p.m.