ext_tracks_wind: Extended best tracks county wind speeds for historical storms

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

Extended best tracks county wind speeds for historical storms

Description

A dataframe with storm winds based on the wind radii in the extended best tracks hurricane data for historical Atlantic basin storms.

Usage

ext_tracks_wind

Format

A dataframe with 203,660 rows and 5 variables:

fips

County's 5-digit Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) code

vmax_gust

Maximum modeled gust wind speed in the county during the storm.

vmax_sust

Maximum modeled sustained wind speed in the county during the storm.

sust_dur

Minutes sustained wind was above 34 knots in the county during the storm.

storm_id

Unique storm identifier with the storm name and year, separated by a hyphen (e.g., "Alberto-1988", "Katrina-2005").

Details

To calculate the wind values in this dataset, we used the wind radii from the HURDAT2 dataset for Atlantic-basin tropical storms (see the reference and source). These wind radii provide the radius in each of four quadrants (northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest) from the storm's center for each of the 6-hour storm observations. We interpolated this data to every 15 minutes using linear interpolation (Section 3.3. of Press et al. (1992)) and scaled each radius to 0.85 of its full value (the original radius gives the maximum extent of 64-knot, 50-knot, and 34-knot winds in each quadrant). For each 15-minute point along the storm's track, we determined which counties fell within each wind radius. We then determined, for each county, the maximum wind value over the course of the storm. These wind values are limited to 34 knots, 50 knots, and 64 knots; if a county is reported as having 64-knot winds in this dataset, it therefore means that the county fell within 0.85 times the 64-knot maximum wind radius at least once during the storm, and so can be interpreted as the county likely experiencing at least 64-knot winds during the course of the storm.

Gust wind speed was calculated using a gust factor of 1.49 applied to the estimated sustained wind speed (see the "Details" vignette of the stormwindmodel package for more details on the choice of this gust factor). Durations were based on the number of minutes winds were above 34 knots in the county over the course of the storm.

Author(s)

Brooke Anderson [e-mail] Andrea Schumacher [e-mail]

Source

HURDAT2 data were obtained from: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/

References

Landsea CW, Franklin JL, Beven JL. May 2015. The revised Atlantic hurricane database (HURDAT2). United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/hurdat/hurdat2-format-atlantic.pdf Retrieved November 28, 2019.

Press WH, Teukolsky SA, Vetterling WT, Flannery BP. 1992. Numerical Recipes in Fortran 77: The Art of Scientific Computing. Cambridge University Press.

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