extRemes (version 2.2)

Flood: United States Total Economic Damage Resulting from Floods

Description

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.

Usage

data(Flood)

Format

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

OBS

a numeric vector giving the line number.

HYEAR

a numeric vector giving the hydrologic year.

USDMG

a numeric vector giving total economic damage (in billions of U.S. dollars) caused by floods.

DMGPC

a numeric vector giving damage per capita.

LOSSPW

a numeric vector giving damage per unit wealth.

Details

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; see also Katz et al. (2002) for analysis).

References

Katz, R. W., Parlange, M. B. and Naveau, P. (2002) Statistics of extremes in hydrology, Advances in Water Resources, 25, 1287--1304.

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

Examples

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