snowloads: The National Snow Load Dataset

Description Usage Format Details References

Description

50 year ground snow load estimates at 11,444 measurement locations in North America.

Usage

1

Format

A data frame with 11,444 rows and 14 variables:

STATION

The numeric station identifier. Actual station names are not provided as each location may represent more than one station.

STATION_NAME

The character name of the first station (in alphabetical order) in the cluster.

STATE

Two character state abbreviation of the measurement location. Includes Canadian provinces.

LONGITUDE

Longitude coordinate position.

LATITUDE

Latitude coordinate position.

ELEVATION

Elevation of the measurement location (meters).

REGIONIII

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency level III numeric ecoregion.

climate

Climate class based on Sturm et al. (1995).

HUC

The United States Geological Survey 8 digit hydrologic unit code.

numST

The number of stations comprising the measurement location.

numMax

The number of annual maximums that were retained from the period of record (i.e. the sample size).

medMax

The median of the annual maximum snow loads from the historical record.

mMax

The maximum snow load observation from the period of record (kpa).

snowload

The estimated design (i.e. 50 year) ground snow load (kpa).

Details

This dataset was created by scraping data from the global historical climatological network. Values were subject to automatic outlier detection and removal. 50 year estimates were obtained by fitting 5 distributions (log-normal, gamma, extreme value distributions types I, II, and III) and selecting the median 98th percentile from the 5 distributions. Climate types were determined using eco-region maps from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and climate classes developed by Sturm et al. (1995).

Note that each measurement location may represent more than one station. When two stations had overlapping period of records, only the maximum snow load estimate was retained. Preference was also always given to direct measurements of snow load.

References

\insertRef

eco2018snowload \insertRefSturm1995snowload


beanb2/snowload documentation built on Jan. 7, 2020, 9:48 p.m.