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Procedure (data analysis)
I collected all data on the natural disasters and weather anomalies for the time period between January 1900 and December 2003. It was very disappointing that the data for 2004, the most unusual year that gave me an idea for this project, were still not available in these databases. My data selection was not actually based on how much damage the natural disasters caused to people, but just on the number of events registered worldwide. All events were also taken without relation to their strength except for earthquakes which were restricted in magnitude to 4 or above on the scale of 0-9 (because in most seismically active areas small tremors happen all the time and without restriction, so it would be hard to separate single events from this “background noise”). The data on droughts were given only on a yearly basis and the data on hurricanes – only for the hurricane season. So, I had to convert the earthquake and volcano data (that were available on a monthly basis) on a yearly basis as well.
After I’ve learned a little bit about IDL (scientific programming language) and how to use some simple commands to open and manipulate the large databases, I plotted each of the chosen parameters versus time (in years). First, I was surprised to learn that these databases are not really uniform during the entire time period of 1900-2003. For example, many volcano data were missing during the World War I and World War II periods, and many more appeared after 1960, probably because satellite measurements provided a view into remote areas previously not accessible. Similar increase in the number of events after 1965 is seen in the hurricane data. So, I visually studied all events for the whole time period, but calculated the correlation between them only after 1965 when the databases stopped showing a significant increase in the number of events with time.