GIS5100 Module 4: Coastal Damage Assessment

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We're back again on the East Coast, specifically in New Jersey, to continue where we left off. This week, we're building on Module 3's flooding assessment with Module 4: Coastal Damage Assessment. Thankfully, this lab did not throw me into a whirlwind in comparison to last week -- things went very smoothly!

Module 4 consisted of 3 parts: tracking Hurricane Sandy from its formation and pathway until it made landfall, a Survey123 damage assessment form, and a case study in New Jersey's local community where structural damage was analyzed.

Part 1 provided background on Hurricane Sandy. We prepared point and polyline data of the storm to track its pathway. This part brought me back to the Cartography course thanks to its section on symbology and labeling. I felt confident with this part since I had already made a fair amount of custom icon points for the choropleth map of wine consumption in Europe, where I created a unique grape icon from scratch. It's fulfilling to have something unique, so the map is more coherent with its theme and overall message, as well as aesthetically pleasing. You can see the path that Hurricane Sandy took on my map below, and I had fun experimenting with the map frame shapes.

Tracking Hurricane Sandy. Tracks the start of the storm before it was a hurricane and up until it makes landfall in the northeastern part of the United States, including also wind speed and barometric pressure.

Part 2 was Survey123 centric. I'm aware and have tinkered around with Survey123 at work since there are several teams throughout that utilize the app for field work -- primarily I'm more experienced with Field Maps by far, though. It was a nice interlude from ArcGIS Pro work to jump into the Survey123 web browser and create a hypothetical survey form that civilians could use to volunteer information on damages throughout the community.

Finally, in Part 3, we covered aerial imagery analysis of pre- and post-storm structure damage in a coastal community in New Jersey. Using the Swipe and Flicker layer features, we created a point feature class with domains to identify which structures were damaged and classify them by severity. As shown below, buildings near the coastline were significantly impacted and mostly destroyed, while the closer inland you go, the higher the survivability and less affected/damaged the buildings are. The aerial imagery shown is post-storm imagery, which has some unfavorable shadowy/dark areas throughout due to the time of day it was captured. This made assigning structure status a bit difficult.

New Jersey Structure Damage Assessment. The different structure statuses identified based on photo interpretation of post-storm imagery.

Structure Damage Counts. The tabular data results of the New Jersey storm damage assessment.

Overall, I had a fun time making the storm tracker map and was even inspired to do a smaller map instead of a basic screenshot for the New Jersey Structure Damage Assessment. You can see my total counts for structures that fell in each buffer zone, which was created using the Buffer and Erase tools, then I made sure to Select by Location and Select by Attribute to filter down to the counts necessary.

To learn more about Hurricane Sandy and its destruction throughout New Jersey, feel free to visit my StoryMaps, Sandy and the Jersey Shore.

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