United States of America

The United States of America is a country located in North America. It is the fourth largest country in the world in terms of area. Due to its size and location, it is composed of a great variety of physical environments, such as large deserts, mountains and forests (Encyclopædia Britannica). The disaster type with the highest occurrence in the US is flooding, with 258 occurrences (59% of disasters recorded), followed by storm (87 occurrences, 20%) and wildfire (59 occurrences, 13%). The deadliest disaster type between 2000 and 2018 is by far storm, with 5428 fatalities (76% of fatalities recorded), followed by extreme temperature (572 deaths, 8%), flooding (553 deaths, 8%) and wildfire (500 deaths, 7%). During this period, the deadliest disaster event was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that killed 1833 people. The disaster type affecting the most people in the USA is also storm, namely 95,239,835 (88%), followed by flood with 11,619,617 affected people (11%). The other disaster types represent less than one percent each, in terms of the total number of people affected. The disaster event that affected the most people in the USA was Hurricane Jonas in 2016, with an estimated 85 million.

Mapping natural disasters from 2000 until 2018

Proportional Symbol Map

Number of times a region has been affected by disasters.

A proportional symbol map uses simple map symbols (usually a circle or square) that vary in size to represent a quantitative value found at that location.

Choropleth Map

Number of disasters per 1 000 km².

In a choropleth map, divided geographical areas or regions are coloured, shaded or patterned in relation to a statistical variable that represents an aggregate summary of a geographic characteristic within each area.

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Kernel Density Map

Kernel density estimation (quadratic kernel).

The kernel density map produces a processed, smoothed visualization of the density of occurrences in the neighbourhood of each resulting map cell. The kernel density map makes it possible to see a concentration of event occurrences. A qualitative scale is used here to ease interpretation.

How to access the EM-DAT database

Go to public.emdat.be

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