Module 4 Hurricane Tracking and Damage Assessment

This week’s natural hazard topic was Hurricanes.  The lab had two parts, the first to create a tracking map of Hurricane Sandy and the second to perform a damage assessment post Hurricane Sandy for one street in Tom’s River Township, New Jersey.  We reviewed the contents of an excel spreadsheet and then created data from it using the Display xy tool.  These became our tracking points for Hurricane Sandy.  We learned how to use the Points to Line Feature tool to create a polyline between the Hurricane Sandy track points.  In order to enhance the aesthetics of the map, we customized the symbology for the hurricane symbol by using the Marker Symbol Options.  We used a VB expression to customize the labels for the track points so that they showed the wind speed and barometric pressure at each point. We learned to use the Grids option in our Data Frame Properties so that we could include and label Graticules (lines dividing the map by meridians and parallels).  In the damage assessment portion of the lab we created a new file database to house our assessment data.  Because we had numerous rasters, both pre and post storm, we needed to create raster mosaics of each class.  This information was stored in our DamageAssessment.gdb.  Within the same geodatabase we created a new Feature Dataset to house information specific to New Jersey.  Within that data set we added multiple feature classes to create the counties, municipalities, state boundary and road systems for New Jersey.  We used the Effects Toolbar to enable the Flicker Tool and the Swipe Tool.  The Swipe tool allowed us to see both the before and after imagery by simply sliding our mouse in the direction we wanted the top image (post storm) to move.  This was a huge help during our visual damage assessment.  Another important skill we learned was how to create attribute domains which can be shared across feature classes, tables, and subtypes within a geodatabase.  We created Domain Names for Inundation, Structure Damage, Wind Damage and Structure Type.  We assigned the domain properties, coded values and the user-friendly description of the coded values.  This greatly reduced the possibility of entry error because it created drop down fields for the user to select the appropriate value.  We then created a feature class to contain our damage assessment points and added the fields we had created to our feature class.  After adding some base map data from our New Jersey feature Dataset we were able to start editing the StructureDamage feature class by creating features and attributes.  This is where the swipe tool came in very handy.  Once the points were created, we symbolized them according to damage level.  We then used the attribute table to extract information to compile our damage assessment table which we placed on the map.  We added some inset maps for location purposes as well as all required cartographic elements to produce our final product.