  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.
