Updates to R package emdatr: Global Disaster Losses from the EMDAT Database

The EMDAT database provides valuable information on human and financial losses from natural disasters around the world. Some of the issues with the EMDAT data are lack of entire data accessibility, static and inconsistent summary reports, and the lack of auxiliary financial and demographic data. The emdatr package addresses some of these issues. 

Major updates in emdatr v0.2:

• Data has been updated to include the whole of 2013.
• Data is now hosted on bitbucket.org and only a sample is provided with the package. Package has the functionality to extract the entire data.
• A new vignette which explains the raw data clean-up and enhancement procedure and which also demonstrates use of the package.

Here is the emdatr package home page on CRAN. Below is a summary graphic on number of natural disasters by decade obtained using the package.

New R package raincpc: Obtain and Analyze Global Rainfall data from the Climate Prediction Center (CPC)

The Climate Prediction Center's (CPC) daily rainfall data for the entire world, 1979 - present & 50-km resolution, is one of the few high quality and long term observation-based rainfall products. Data is available at CPC's ftp site. However, it is a lot of data and there is no software to analyze and visualize the data.

Some issues with size/format of the CPC data:

• too many files (365/366 files per year * 34 years, separate folder for each year)
• each file has 360 rows and 720 columns
• file naming conventions have changed over time - one format prior to 2006 and couple of different formats afterwards
• file formats have changed over time - gzipped files prior to 2008 and plain binary files afterwards
• downloading multiple files simultaneously from the CPC ftp site, using wget, does not seem to work properly
• there is no software/code readily available to easily process/visualize the data

The R package `raincpc` makes life easier by providing functionality to download and process the data from CPC's ftp site. Some features of this new package are:

• Data for anytime period during 1979-present can be downloaded and processed
• Just two functions required: one to download the data (`cpc_get_rawdata`) and another to process the downloaded data (`cpc_read_rawdata`)
• Making spatial maps using the processed data is easy, via ggplot

Here are some examples on how to obtain and visualize the data - https://github.com/RationShop/raincpc

Below are the relevant CRAN and GitHub sites:

• CRAN package repository
• GitHub site for the final R package raincpc

Please let me know if you find any errors or if you have any comments or suggestions.