Wrangler for the Emergency Events Database: A Tool for Geocoding and Analysis of a Global Disaster Dataset

TL;DR

The paper introduces WEED, a tool that enhances the Emergency Events Database by adding geographic coordinates to disaster records, facilitating geospatial analysis of historical disasters.

Contribution

WEED is an open-source tool that geocodes disaster data from EM-DAT, enabling precise spatial analysis and customization for researchers.

Findings

Successfully geocoded multiple disaster records with improved accuracy.

Enabled integration of EM-DAT with geospatial datasets for analysis.

Provided a customizable, open-source geocoding solution for disaster data.

Abstract

There is an increasing need for precise location information on historical disasters, such as mass casualty events caused by weather or earthquakes, but existing disaster datasets often do not provide geographic coordinates of past events. Here we describe a new tool, the Wrangler for the Emergency Events Database (WEED), that associates latitude and longitude coordinates with entries in the widely used Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). WEED takes as input records from EM-DAT, and geocodes the list of cities, states, and other location types associated with a given disaster using the R language with the GeoNames web service. Error processing is performed, and users are given the ability to customize the logic used in geocoding; the open-source nature of the tool also allows more general customization or extension by users. This tool provides researchers the ability to easily prepare EM-DAT data for analysis with geophysical, hydrological, and other geospatial variables.