county_distance {hurricaneexposure}

Hurricane exposure by distance for counties

Description

This function takes a list of US counties,based on their 5-digit Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) codes, boundaries on the range of years to be considered, and thresholds for distance between each county and the storm track for the county to be considered "exposed" to the storm. Based on these inputs, the function returns a dataframe with the subset of Atlantic basin storms meeting those criteria for each of the listed counties.

Usage

county_distance(counties, start_year, end_year, dist_limit)

Arguments

counties

Character vector of the five-digit Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) codes for counties for which the user wants to determine storm exposure.

start_year

Four-digit integer with first year to consider.

end_year

Four-digit integer with last year to consider.

dist_limit

Maximum distance, in kilometers, of how close the storm track must come to the county's population mean center to classify the county as "exposed" to the storm.

Details

For more information on how distances between counties and storm tracks are calculated for this function, see the documentation for the closest_dist dataset that comes with this package.

Value

Returns a dataframe with a row for each county-storm pair and with columns for:

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

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

• closest_date: Date (based on local time) of the closest approach of the storm to the county's population mean center.

• storm_dist: Minimum distance (in kilometers) between the storm's track and the county's population mean center.

• local_time: 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_time_utc: 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.

Note

Only counties in states in the eastern half of the United States can be processed by this function.

Examples

# Ensure that data package is available before running the example.
#  If it is not, see the `hurricaneexposure` package vignette for details
# on installing the required data package.
if (requireNamespace("hurricaneexposuredata", quietly = TRUE)) {

  county_distance(counties = c("22071", "51700"),
              start_year = 1995, end_year = 2005,
              dist_limit = 75)

}