Lab 8: Applications in GIS

This week's lab focus on damage assessment. The lab mainly focused on Hurricane Sandy. The map that was created at the end of the lab shows the path the hurricane took and what category of hurricane it was at that point in time. To create this map, I added the world and US shapefiles to ArcMap. I needed to select only the states affected by the hurricane, so I used a select by attribute to select the states. I added the hurricane points to the map and added XY data. To create a path of the hurricane, I used the point to line tool.

Next, I needed to adjust the hurricane symbology to look like a hurricane. To do this I had to edit the symbol's properties. I had to change the symbols to ESRI Meteorological. I found the symbol that looked like a hurricane, but then used the angle setting to tilt it. I also added a center dot on top of the symbol as well. I also changed the color of the symbol to red. I saved the new symbol and category under unique values.

Hurricane Sandy Path

The next step was to add graticules to the map. I selected the data frames properties and went to Grid. From there, I selected the graticule that uses meridian and parallels. Finally, just had to add the key map elements.

To perform a damage assessment on the New Jersey shoreline, I added a new feature class to place a point on each parcel. After placing a point on each parcel, I updated the points attributes. I did this for every parcel in the layer. To determine how many structures fell within 100, 200, or 300 meters of the coastline, I used the select by location tool. I also did create a buffer for each to determine how many fell within the distance from the coastline. To create the coastline I created a new feature class of a polyline that was parallel to the parcel area.

Below is the table of the result:

Structural Damage	Counts of structures within distance categories
	0-100 M	100-200M	200-300M
No Damage	0	0	1
Affected	0	0	7
Minor Damage	0	14	24
Major Damage	3	19	11
Destroyed	9	10	7
Total	12	43	50