Flood                package:extRemes                R Documentation

_U_n_i_t_e_d _S_t_a_t_e_s _t_o_t_a_l _e_c_o_n_o_m_i_c _d_a_m_a_g_e _r_e_s_u_l_t_i_n_g _f_r_o_m _f_l_o_o_d_s.

_D_e_s_c_r_i_p_t_i_o_n:

     United States total economic damage (in billions of U.S. dollars)
     caused by floods by hydrologic year from 1932-1997.  See Pielke
     and Downton (2000) for more information.

_U_s_a_g_e:

     data(Flood)

_F_o_r_m_a_t:

     A data frame with 66 observations on the following 5 variables.

     _O_B_S a numeric vector giving the line number.

     _H_Y_E_A_R a numeric vector giving the hydrologic year.

     _U_S_D_M_G a numeric vector giving total economic damage (in billions
          of U.S. dollars) caused by floods.

     _D_M_G_P_C a numeric vector giving damage per capita.

     _L_O_S_S_P_W a numeric vector giving damage per unit wealth.

_D_e_t_a_i_l_s:

     From Pielke and Downton (2000):

     The National Weather Service (NWS) maintains a national flood
     damage record from 1903 to the present, and state level data from
     1983 to the present.  The reported losses are for "significant
     flood events" and include only direct economic damage that results
     from flooding caused by ranfall and/or snowmelt.  The annual
     losses are based on "hydrologic years" from October through
     September.  Flood damage per capita is computed by dividing the
     inflation-adjusted losses for each hydrological year by the
     estimated population on 1 July of that year (www.census.gov). 
     Flood damage per million dollars of national wealth uses the net
     stock of fixed reproducible tangible wealth in millions of current
     dollars (see Pielke and Downton (2000) for more details).

_S_o_u_r_c_e:

     NWS web site: <URL: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oh/hic>

_R_e_f_e_r_e_n_c_e_s:

     Gilleland, Eric and Katz, Richard W. Tutorial for the 'Extremes
     Toolkit: Weather and Climate Applications of Extreme Value
     Statistics.' <URL: http://www.assessment.ucar.edu/toolkit>, 2005.

     Katz, Richard W., Parlange, Marc B. and Naveau, Philippe,
     Statistics of extremes in hydrology, Advances in Water Resources,
     25:1287-1304, 2002.

     Pielke, Roger A. Jr. and Downton, Mary W., Precipitation and
     damaging floods: trends in the United States, 1932-97, Journal of
     Climate, 13 (20):3625-3637, 2000.

_E_x_a_m_p_l_e_s:

     data(Flood)
     plot( Flood[,2], Flood[,3], type="l", lwd=2, xlab="hydrologic year", ylab="Total economic damage (billions of U.S. dollars)")

