Sunday, June 17, 2018

Tracking Hurricanes and Assessing Damage

This week in my Applications in GIS class we looked at how to apply GIS to hurricane tracking and damage assessments.  The scenario we applied the techniques this week involved Hurricane Sandy which caused unprecedented damage for a category 1 storm. 

The first map I made was a tracking map for the storm from start to finish.  The track shows what category the storm was as it moved north through the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean.  The points along the track also showed the wind speeds and barometric pressures.  Finally, the states that were affected by the hurricane were also highlighted on the map.  The final product is below:


The second map I created took a more involved look at assessing the damage that was caused in a New Jersey neighborhood when Sandy made landfall.  I analyzed pictures of a section of beachfront property that were taken before and after the hurricane blew through the north eastern United States.  The intent of the analysis was to determine what kind of damage occurred to the homes near the coast.  The types of damage that we looked at was structural, wind, and storm surge inundation.  The section I looked at appeared to have every house suffer storm surge inundation.  What was really difficult to determine was the effects of wind and structural damage aside from those houses that were completely wiped out.  The parcels were noted with the level of structural damage on the map.  A table was also created with the tallies of properties and the type of damage on them.  Finally, both the pre and post-storm imagery was used to show the extent of the damage.  The map that was created is below. 


Let me know what you think!

No comments:

Post a Comment