Description
Background
Hurricane season is back and it came with a vengeance. Over five hurricanes have passed so
far and two of them have done massive damage to the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico. In
order to prepare countermeasures against the destruction these atmospheric phenomena leave
on their way, it is imperative to gather information about their wind speeds and trajectory for
the creation of better predictive models. The National Hurricane Center is responsible to
record these disasters and create these predictive models (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/).
For this project, you are tasked to create a program that stores a record of all the
hurricanes that occurred within a range of years into a dictionary of dictionaries. Using
this dictionary, it is required to extract all the hurricanes that occurred in a year and
print the peak wind speed of each hurricane with their coordinates and dates, plot the
trajectory of each hurricane, and plot a line chart with the peak wind speeds and show
the category each hurricane reached.
Project Specifications
1. You must implement the following functions:
a) open_file() prompts the user to enter a filename containing the hurricane data. The
program will try to open a file. An error message should be shown if the file can not be
opened (use the try-except construct in Chapter 6). This function will loop until it receives
proper input and successfully opens the file. It returns a file pointer.
b) update_dictionary(dictionary, year, hurricane_name, data)
receives the dictionary, the year, the name of the hurricane, and the tuple (data) with the
coordinates, date, wind speed, and pressure. The updated dictionary is returned. In this
project we use a dictionary with year as the key and whose value is another dictionary. The
nested dictionary will have the name of the hurricane as its key and a list of tuples as the
value. For example
Dict = {‘2017’:{‘MARIA’: hurricane_data1, ‘IRMA’: hurricane_data2} }
where hurricane_data1 and hurricane_data2 are lists of tuples.
The value of expression Dict[‘2017’][‘MARIA’] is the list hurricane_data1
If the dictionary[year] is not defined, assign an empty dictionary to this entry and
then fill that empty dictionary using hurricane_name as the key and that hurricane’s
data as its value. Remember to put that data in a list (so you can append more data for that
hurricane when you read it). If the dictionary[year] is defined but the
dictionary[year][hurricane_name] is not defined (that is, this is a new
hurricane name for that year), add this new hurricane to the year (similar to the previous
when we put the first hurricane in for the year) using hurricane_name as the key and
that hurricane’s data as its value (in a list, as before). Otherwise (that is, both the year and
the hurricane are already in the dictionary) append the data tuple to the existing list for that
year and hurricane.
c) create_dictionary(fp) takes one parameter fp, the file pointer, reads the file,
and creates the dictionary containing the hurricane records. All the work of updating the
dictionary is done in the update_dictionary function. Each line in the file contains the
following:
year = line[0]
hurricane_name = line[1]
lat = float(line[3])
long = float(line[4])
date = line[5]
wind = float(line[6]) if the value is a number, 0 otherwise
pressure = float(line[7]) if the value is a number, 0 otherwise
Create a data tuple: (lat, long, date, wind, pressure); then call the
update_dictionary function to add the tuple to the dictionary. See the dictionary
created for the data file small.txt in novacky_dictionary.txt to make sure you are
creating the correct dictionary.
d) display_table(dictionary, year) This function receives a dictionary and a
year value and for every hurricane in that year it displays the name of the hurricane, the
coordinate, date, and value where the hurricane reached the peak wind speed. If two data
points have the same peak wind speed, print the one with the larger lat value. If they have
the same peak wind spend and lat, print the one with larger long. (Hint: sort the data for a
storm first on wind speed, then on lat and then on long. largest first; itemgetter is your
friend.)
e) get_years(dictionary) Returns the oldest year and most recent year (min and
max year) in the dictionary. Return a tuple (min_year, max_year). Hint: sort the keys!
Use this function to find the range of years and print it.
f) main() The main function use the functions mentioned above.
g) Extra Credit. (2 %)
You will need to implement
prepare_plot(dictionary, year) Call this function to prepare for plotting
hurricanes for the specified year. This function should create the following lists. Each list
should be ordered by hurricane name, e.g. max_speed is a list of peak speeds, but should
be ordered by hurricane name (see the plot): (1) names : a sorted list of all the names of the
hurricanes in that year—sorted alphabetically, (2) max_speed : a list of maximum speeds
of all the hurricanes. Finally return the two lists in a tuple: (names,max_speed). You
should call the prepare_plot function inside the main function. It should prompt the
user for whether to plot. I provide plot_wind_chart(year,size,names,max_speed)
function. Call it if the user decides to plot. Another issue you may experience is (I did), your
program may not recognize pylab – this is one of the many resources available to python
users. I downloaded python 3.6 (includes pylab) from this website https://www.anaconda.com/download/
then choose windows or mac download. This version of python will replace the one you
are currently using but contains lots of resources like pylab, matplotlib, …
2. Hints and Suggestions
a) I’m giving you the data file called storm_track.txt use it rather than
storm_track1.txt used in the sample runs. Dictionary values can be any object such
as floats and lists, but can also be another dictionary. In this project we use a
dictionary with year as the key and whose value is another dictionary. The nested
dictionary will have the name of the hurricane as its key and a list of tuples as the
value. For example
D = {‘2017’:{‘MARIA’: hurricane_data1, ‘IRMA’: hurricane_data2} }
where hurricane_data1 and hurricane_data2 are lists of tuples. The value of
expression D[‘2017’][‘MARIA’] is hurricane_data1
b) Dictionaries are unordered, so how do we sort keys (or values) of a dictionary? One
way is to create a list of keys and sort that list. To get the list of keys on a dictionary,
you can use the keys() method.
Test Case 1:
Enter hurricane data: storm_track1.txt
Hurricane Record Software
Records from 2007 to 2017
Enter the year to show hurricane data or ‘quit’: 2017
Peak Wind Speed for the Hurricanes in 2017
Name Coordinates Wind Speed (knots) Date
ARLENE ( 40.00,-48.00) 45.00 04/21/06Z
BRET ( 11.60,-64.40) 40.00 06/20/12Z
CINDY ( 27.30,-91.90) 50.00 06/21/06Z
DON ( 11.50,-56.20) 45.00 07/18/06Z
FOUR ( 15.60,-50.90) 25.00 07/07/12Z
FRANKLIN ( 20.20,-96.10) 75.00 08/10/00Z
GERT ( 40.10,-58.40) 90.00 08/17/00Z
HARVEY ( 28.00,-97.00) 115.00 08/26/00Z
IRMA ( 19.40,-66.80) 160.00 09/07/00Z
JOSE ( 16.90,-59.30) 135.00 09/09/11Z
KATIA ( 21.00,-96.50) 90.00 09/08/18Z
LEE ( 31.20,-57.10) 100.00 09/27/18Z
MARIA ( 17.30,-64.70) 150.00 09/20/00Z
NATE ( 28.40,-89.10) 80.00 10/07/18Z
OPHELIA ( 37.30,-21.50) 100.00 10/15/00Z
SIX ( 27.70,-83.20) 40.00 07/31/06Z
Do you want to plot? Yes
Test Case 2:
Enter hurricane data: storm_track1.txt
Hurricane Record Software
Records from 2007 to 2017
Enter the year to show hurricane data or ‘quit’: abc
Error with the year key! Try another year
Enter the year to show hurricane data or ‘quit’: 2000
Error with the year key! Try another year
Enter the year to show hurricane data or ‘quit’: 2010
Peak Wind Speed for the Hurricanes in 2010
Name Coordinates Wind Speed (knots) Date
ALEX ( 24.20,-97.70) 95.00 07/01/02Z
BONNIE ( 23.80,-77.80) 40.00 07/23/06Z
COLIN ( 25.60,-66.60) 50.00 08/06/00Z
DANIELLE ( 27.10,-60.10) 115.00 08/27/18Z
EARL ( 28.60,-74.30) 125.00 09/02/06Z
FIONA ( 19.50,-62.50) 55.00 09/01/18Z
FIVE ( 26.50,-85.00) 30.00 08/11/06Z
GASTON ( 12.90,-36.10) 35.00 09/01/18Z
HERMINE ( 25.30,-97.40) 60.00 09/07/02Z
IGOR ( 18.90,-53.50) 135.00 09/15/00Z
JULIA ( 17.70,-32.20) 120.00 09/15/12Z
KARL ( 19.60,-95.60) 110.00 09/17/12Z
LISA ( 20.40,-27.80) 75.00 09/25/00Z
MATTHEW ( 15.20,-84.60) 50.00 09/25/00Z
NICOLE ( 27.40,-78.50) 40.00 09/30/12Z
OTTO ( 28.50,-59.70) 75.00 10/09/06Z
PAULA ( 19.60,-86.00) 90.00 10/13/00Z
RICHARD ( 17.20,-88.20) 85.00 10/25/00Z
SHARY ( 35.10,-57.20) 65.00 10/30/12Z
TOMAS ( 13.80,-62.40) 85.00 10/31/06Z
TWO ( 26.10,-96.60) 30.00 07/08/12Z
Do you want to plot? n
Program execution complete!
