closest_dist: Closest distances between counties and a storm track

In geanders/hurricaneexposuredata: Data Characterizing Exposure to Hurricanes in United States Counties

Closest distances between counties and a storm track

Description

A dataframe that gives the distance and date-time for the closest approach of each tropical storm to the mean population center of each US county in states in the eastern half of the United States. This data includes all Atlantic-basin storms between 1988 and 2018 that came within at least 250 km of at least one US county.

Usage

closest_dist

Format

A dataframe with 409,716 rows and 7 variables:

storm_id

Unique storm identifier with the storm name and year, separated by a hyphen (e.g., "Alberto-1988", "Katrina-2005"). Some storms are "Unnamed" or have other generic names. In these cases, it may be preferable to identify the storm using the first four characters of their ATCF ID (usa_atcf_id) and the storm season rather than the storm ID (e.g., 'AL13-1988').

usa_atcf_id

Character string with the Automated Tropical Cyclone Forecasting System ID for the storm.

fips

Character string with the county's 5-digit Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) code

closest_time_utc

Character string of time, in UTC, of the closest approach of the storm to the county's population mean center, based on storm tracks linearly interpolated to 15-minute increments.

storm_dist

Numeric of the minimum distance (in kilometers) between the storm's track and the county's population mean center.

local_time

Character string of local time of the closest approach of the storm to the county's population mean center, based on storm tracks linearly interpolated to 15-minute increments.

closest_date

Character string with date (based on local time) of the closest approach of the storm to the county's population mean center.

Details

The minimum distance was calculated using the Great Circle method, using the spDist function from the sp package. The time of the closest approach of the storm to each county was converted from UTC to local time using the countytimezones package for the local_time and closest_date columns.

geanders/hurricaneexposuredata documentation built on May 25, 2022, 5:15 a.m.