GIS 4930 - Project 02: Addressing Mountain Top Removal (Hydrology & Remote Sensing)

Preparation

This week sees the beginning of a new project, the creation of a story map that shares information on the landscape footprint of an extreme coal mining practice - Mountain Top Removal.

In addition to the description of the practice shared above, we will be performing analyses of the how a regions hydrology and topography is impacted by this kind of mining. Preparations for this week included generation of hydrological rasters and shapefiles from an assigned study area (see below) and setting up a placeholder site for a story map that will be used to share the analysis once it is complete.

Preparatory Base Map for MTR Analysis in the Appalachians

GIS 4930 - Creation of Route Maps

This week saw the creation of a lot of maps, each with a specific audience in mind and intended to describe routes for those audiences.

One of the maps below is an inset map from a larger document showing a basic route from a hospital expected to be inundated by an oncoming storm to one on higher ground. The second map shows a driving route for emergency services personnel delivering supplies from the National Guard armory to one of the emergency shelters set up throughout the city of Tampa.

Route to St. Joeseph's Hospital

Route from National Guard Armory to Tampa Bay Blvd Elementary School (temporary emergency shelter)

GIS 4930 - GIS Network Analyst Route Generation

This week I took the road network I generated last week and created routes for the ostensible emergency hurricane situation in Tampa that's the conceit of this current mapping project. Routes were generated to evacuate a hospital, to direct national guard troops from the local armory to evacuation shelters to deliver emergency supplies, to show routes out of downtown to an evacuation center and a set of polygons was generated that shows residents which evacuation center is closest from their location.

All of these routes are shown on the map below, which makes things quite busy. Next week routes will each be featured individually on maps generated with a specific target audience in mind.

Tampa Metro Area Basic Evacuation & Emergency Services Routes

GIS 4930 - Network Analyst Data Preparation

This is the first installment of a multi-week project. The conceit of the project is that optimal evacuation routes need to be generated for the Tampa, Florida metro area just days ahead of an expected hurricane. These routes will then be produced in maps for use by both the general public and by emergency personnel. This week's was creating the base map from which a network dataset will be generated that will be used to generate routes in upcoming weeks. This involved prepping feature datasets for that upcoming work and also generating a basic map that shows the location of emergency services and also the expected flood zone of the area. This prep also included creating attributes in feature datasets that will be used for generating a network dataset.

Basic Map of 5 foot flood zone for Tampa, Florida metro area