How to download Entity data for an interval of dates

Question

I am interested in downloading "TropicalStorm" data for hurricanes with the highest "WindSpeed" occurring in the years 1990 through 2010. However, I am not sure of how to go about the third aspect of selecting data for a certain interval of dates.

The documentation page for EntityClass states that

Property values in implicitly defined entity classes may make use of Quantity (and intervals of Quantity) for dimensional values, DateObject for dates, TakeLargest and TakeSmallest for ordinal selections, and ContainsAll, ContainsExactly, ContainsAny, ContainsOnly, ContainsNone for entities. Lists of entities are interpreted as ContainsAll, while a single entity is interpreted as ContainsAny[{entity}].

For a number or Quantity, I know I could do this (example taken from documentation):

EntityList[EntityClass["Element", {"Density"->Quantity[Interval[{5, 8}], "Grams"/"Centimeters"^3]}]]

Is there a way I could use an analogous approach with DateObject instead of Quantity? Something like this is what I mean:

EntityList[EntityClass["TropicalStorm", {"Date" -> DateObject[Interval[{1990, 2010}]], "WindSpeed" -> TakeLargest[10]}]]

(Though this does not work of course.) If there is not a good way to do this with Interval, then what would be the best way to download data that falls within a certain range of dates?

I know I could download all of the data and then process it afterwards to filter out undesired dates, but that seems much less efficient and I feel there should be a better way.

I also considered using something along the lines of ContainsAny[DateRange[DateObject[{1990}], DateObject[{2010}]] to specify the interval of dates, but that seems far less efficient and even then I am not sure how to use ContainsAny in this context (see my other question Use of ContainsAny in EntityClass).

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

The implied EntityClass behavior with multiple predicates is to evaluate each predicate independently, and then apply Intersection to the results. You are probably expecting the predicates to be applied in sequence.

This means that to find the 10 highest wind speed storms from 1990 to 2010, you should probably find the storms that occur between 1990 to 2010, and then select the 10 storms with the highest wind speed.

Something like the following:

storms = EntityList @ EntityClass[
    "TropicalStorm",
    "EndDate"->Between[{DateObject[{1990,1,1}],DateObject[{2010,12,31}]}]
];

TakeLargestBy[
    Thread[{storms,EntityValue[storms,"WindSpeed"]}],
    Last,
    10
]

{{Unnamed,103.57mi/h},{Irene,92.0624mi/h},{Hunt,86.3085mi/h},{Pongsona,86.3085mi/h},{Grace,86.3085mi/h},{Florence,86.3085mi/h},{Floyd,80.5546mi/h},{Yuri,80.5546mi/h},{Unnamed,80.5546mi/h},{Dera,74.8007mi/h}}

Since the "WindSpeed" property is not "Cacheable" (it depends on time for current storms), using EntityValue will download the "WindSpeed" every time, so you might consider storing values yourself.