**Technical Questions**

1.  *Find the month in 2015 where the State of Washington had the largest number of storm events. How many days of storm-free weather occurred in that month?* <br>
To get started I downloaded Libre, however while trying to google help discovered I needed Microsoft excel (the help was all for excel). I then downloaded Excel, however the file would not open like it would in Libre which is when I realized Libre had requested a conversion that Excel did not (this realization came after trying to delete and re-download the files, opening with only excel. Obviously that did not work). I googled how to convert CSV to excel, and found that it is indeed a text document that would require conversion. I began trying to convert the information, but then realized it had already been converted in Libre, so I saved as an XLS file from Libre and opened it in Excel.
Part of the google references for filtering data was to select non existent arrows on headers. After doing some additional searches, I found that the 'help' was actually about a table. I needed to convert my data to a table, so I typed A1:AW57516 into the 'name box' to select all the information, hit enter, went to insert, table, included headers, and was good to go.
The 'read me' explained that cz_type indicated the country, zone, or marine and that cz_name were the assigned names. I excluded all that began with A, B, or C (by selecting the header cz_name and deselecting A, B, C names to exclude them). This question asks only about the state of Washington, so I excluded all the other states (went to state, selected header, deselected all, then selected only Washington).
I then filtered month by month to see how many events occurred per month. To do this, I filtered for each month, copied the applicable cells, and pasted them into a new spreadsheet. When lined up from cell 1 down it was clear which month had the most entries. The least number of events was in March with 4, while the most was in December with 140 events.
For the second portion of the question, I looked at the beginning and end dates of the storm events. December has 31 days, and the number of days not represented in either the beginning or end dates (or in between them) was 8 days total, namely the 14th and the 25th-31st. So the final answer is December with 8 total days that had no storm events.


2.  *How many storms impacting trees happened between 8PM EST and 8AM EST in 2000?*<br>
Because I skipped question 2 and went to question 3 while I was still working with the 2015 data, for question 2 I needed to reset the states and damages to include all, as well as redo the counties/zones/marines to exclude A-C. The question posed asks about storms impacting trees in EST, so I excluded all time zones not in EST. (Assumed that we were not supposed to convert all other time zones to EST, as that would change which geographical locations are being looked at as well.) I then eliminated anything that was before 8pm or after 8am est - which equates to 2000 and 0800 military time as listed on excel. (simply excluding did not work for me, so I sorted from smallest to largest, deleted from 0801-1959, and then excluded all the blanks.) I then searched (find all) for the word tree, and found that it was including a county called peachtree in Georgia so I added a space before the word tree (with no spaces after, so that it would include the variation ‘trees’) and found 1,516 cells, aka storm events, affecting trees.

3.   *In which year (2000 or 2015) did storms have a higher monetary impact within the boundaries of the 13 original colonies?*<br>
For the year 2015, I reset all the data to the original information other than the counties/zones/marines that begin with A, B, or C. This question asks about the 13 original colonies, which I had to google - Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. I excluded all but these. I went to the first column ‘damage_property’ and excluded the 0 k and blanks.  I copied the column into another spreadsheet so that I wouldn’t accidentally corrupt the original information. I tried autosum, but after some troubleshooting realized it would not work with the k in the same cell as the number. I googled how to remove a letter from an excel column. I went to find and replace, input ‘k’ in find what and a blank space in replace with, and then auto summed that information. The answer was 81525.7k (81,525,700). In order to separate the M’s I tried to search and replace but the numbers would get mixed up with the k’s. After some contemplation, and a few unsuccessful attempts, I made the information into a table, selected the header, and excluded everything that didn’t have an M in it. Then I searched and excluded M and auto summed the results, which were 189.8 m. I then added the two amounts 81,525,700 + 189,800,000 = 271,325,700 total for damaged property. I did the same for damaged crops (which was infinitely faster, yay learning!) and got 2656k (2,656,000) and 11m (11,000,000) = 13,656,000. Adding both damage costs together = 284,981,700.00 total for 2015.
I did the same process as above with the 2000 data. (downloaded in Libre, converted to xls file, opened in excel, converted to table (A1:AY52008), removed A-C from c/z/m, excluded all but the 13 original colonies listed above from the states, excluded 0k and blanks from damaged property and crops (but this time could do them together since i had a better understanding of what I was doing), did the millions separately, added together).    58477.36k (58,477,360) + 58832.75m (58,832,750,000) 16364.3k (16,364,300) 16610.91m (16,610,910,000) = 75,518,501,660 total for 2000.
So, 284,981,700.00 total for 2015 and 75,518,501,660 total for 2000 makes year 2000 the answer for higher monetary damages.
After completing everything I noticed that one time copy and paste left out some numbers when going from a table to a regular format, which I do not believe affected the outcomes from what I double checked, but I still wanted to mention it in case something is incorrect with the numbers. The overall question, however, would not be affected as the many millions of crop damage in the year 2000 far outweighs anything in 2015.