Jason's GeoJourney

This week in GIS 5100 we continued the study of hazards with a focus on damage assessment. For the first part of the assignment, we were directed to create a map based on NOAA data of the track of Hurricane Sandy, also known as "Superstorm Sandy" showing its progression from a tropical storm in the southern Caribbean Sea on October 22, 2012 to its landfall on the northeastern coast of the United States as a Category 1 hurricane on October 29, 2012.  The path of the storm is symbolized by its type along with labels showing MPH winds and barometric pressure in specific points. The storm's maximum wind speed reached 105 MPH and the lowest barometric pressure was 940. For the next part of the assignment, I created a brief survey with ArcGIS Survey 123, which is an online platform that allows individuals to report damage and submit photographs in the field that are geocoded and can help complement remote-sensed data: Hurricane Sandy Citizen Damage Assessment* *This survey is o...

This week in GIS Applications, we examined the topic of Coastal Flooding by learning how to assess this type of hazard to communities through the delineation of coastal flood zones via various digital elevation models (DEMs).   Here we used a variety of techniques and tools such as overlay analysis in vector and raster domains while examining the differences in different types such as traditional USGS DEM and LiDAR derived DEM data. For the first part, I determined the level of erosion that occurred on the New Jersey coastline, particularly in Mantoloking, as the resulting from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Here I compared pre and post sandy LiDAR imagery of the area by creating DEMs of the area. This involved converting the .las files to TINs and using the Raster Calculator tool in order to highlight the greatest areas of erosion through a symbolized color ramp (going from red to blue). In the second part of the lab, I analyzed storm surge in Cape May County, New Jersey, by determi...