Project 1: Prepare Week, Network Analyst

     The focus of Project 1 is to use ArcGIS Network Analyst for a Hurricane Evacuation Scenario.  The first week of the project focused on an overview of the project.  The lab concentrated on data preparation for the network analysis which included creating a basemap containing MEDS (in this case armories, hospitals, police stations, fire stations, shelters and roads), establishing the potential flood zones using an assigned criteria of lands less than 6’ above mean sea level, and editing Metadata as required.  The lab involved, clipping and projecting of both vector and raster data.  Additionally, since the raster needed to be part of our analysis it was necessary to reclassify it and convert to a polygon dataset.  We added mileage, time and flood categories to the Street attribute table in order to prepare ourselves for the Network Analyst tool next week.  As always, organizing our existing and created data is important and to that end we created a new file geodatabase to house our information; additionally, since the Network Analyst tools require a network dataset, we created a feature dataset to house our data for use in next week’s analysis.

Here is my basemap for our Tampa Bay Hurricane Evacuation Project: