Damage Assessments - Module 5

This week, we conducted damage assessments using imagery and data from Hurricane Sandy, which occurred in 2012. I truly enjoyed this week's lab. A damage assessment from Hurricane Michael (2018) is what initially sparked my interest in GIS and this graduate program. 

For this week's damage assessment lab, we first had to prepare the data and imagery for analysis. Second, we then created attribute domains to further categorize the data (codes/descriptions). Next, we utilized imagery from before and after Hurricane Sandy's landfall and a parcel map to classify damage to different structures near the coastline. 

After we completed classifying the data, we inserted a coastline (polyline) feature classes and digitized the coastline.  From here, we created a multi-ring buffer to include damaged structures within 0-100 meters, 100-200 meters, and 200 meters from the coastline.

I attempted to use a spatial join between Ring Buffer and Structure Damage layer; however,  I could not get the domains which displayed the “Structure Damage Category” to display properly. Since I couldn’t get the Spatial Join feature to work the way I wanted, I opened the “Select by Attributes”  with a query that included the category and distance , which provided counts for the table below: