Visualizing Katrina’s strongest winds, with R

[This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Here's a new picture of the devastation wrought by Katrina in 2005. This image shows the maximum wind speeds of the hurricane, not at any particular point of time, but over the duration of the entire storm:

KatrinaMax

The data come from NOAA's H*Wind project, which makes windspeed data from sensors on the ground and floating in the ocean available to the public. Catastrophe scientist Dr. Rob Hodges analyzed the data using the R language to determine the maximum windspeed in small hexagons tiled across the Gulf region and then visualize the results. While the strongest winds blew offshore, they nonetheless contributed to the storm surge that ultimately swamped New Orleans.

You can find Dr. Hodge's R code behind this analysis at GitHub. The visualization itself was created using the spplot function with panel.polygonsplot panel function. Open data also led to this visualization of Hurricane Sandy's path as it the disaster unfolded.

Catastrophe Science: Maximum Observed Windspeeds Using H*Wind Analyses

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)