Saturday, August 29, 2015

Special Topics in GIS: Network Prep

Greetings,
     Welcome to week one of my Special Topics in GIS class. This class is organized into 4 larger real life style projects, dedicated to a particular topic. These projects will be broken down into multiple weeks with different aspects explored each week. The overall flow should go, project preparation during the first week, analysis the second, and presentation of the project the following.
      This first project is dedicated to an incredibly relevant topic at present. It looks at network analysis as it relates to Hurricane or other natural disaster response. The overall end goals for this project are to find and produce the shortest / most efficient routes to many locations as necessitated by the project. Locate the closest facilities to particuclar areas, Define and determine service areas based on existing facilities. Create a network using GIS data.
       The subject area for this project is Tampa Bay Florida, which is currently in the path of some tropical storms and could very easily have flooding in areas depicted on the base map below. Being the prepare week the overall objective is to acquire the data necessary for a base map and further analysis. The data was all provided by UWF including an elevation layer, point data for fire, police, hospitals, schools designated as shelters, and a national guard armory supply drop location, and roadways. The biggest aspect to the analysis this week was preparing the potential flood zones. This involved me taking the baseline DEM and reclassifying it into appropriately usable elevation increments. I changed its default measurements to differentiate elevations by 1 foot increments between 0-10, then 10-20, and 20+ for the study area. This reclassified DEM was then converted into a polygon feature class for easier subsequent processing. It was identified that flooding is most likely to occur in areas less than 6 feet of elevation. As such, all those areas less than 6 feet were selected and exported as their own feature class. You can see all of these aspects culminated in the map below.



Here you see the Tampa Study area as it relates to most likely flood zones, with transportation arteries that would be affected. This is just a basic overview of the area and facilities present for the next weeks analysis phase of the project. I will keep you updated on the project as it goes from week to week. Thank you.

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