Updates to R package raincpc: Global Daily Rainfall for over 35 years

The Climate Prediction Center's  (CPC) global rainfall data, 1979 - present, 50 km resolution, is one of the few high-quality, long-term, observation-based, daily rainfall products available for free. Although raw data is available at CPC's ftp site, obtaining and processing the data is not easy since there are over 12000 files, and formats and names of these files have changed over time. 

The latest version of the raincpc package provides functionality to download, process and visualize over 35 years of global daily rainfall data from CPC. The vignette demonstrates the use of this package, including the extraction and display of regional rainfall data.

Following are some graphics from the raincpc vignette.

New R package hazus: Damage functions from FEMA's HAZUS software for use in modeling financial losses from natural disasters

Damage Functions (DFs) translate physical damage to property, resulting from natural disasters, to financial damage. FEMA in USA developed several thousand DFs and these serve as a benchmark in natural catastrophe modeling, both in academia and industry. However, these DFs and their documentation are buried within FEMA's HAZUS software and are not easily accessible for analysis and visualization.

The hazus package provides more than 1300 raw DFs used by FEMA's HAZUS software and also functionality to extract and visualize DFs specific to the flood hazard.

Here is the link to the package home on CRAN. Below is a graphic from the package vignette in R markdown.