Geoprocessing Blog 7

For this weeks blog my goal was to show counties that were affected by hurricanes and tornadoes in three different years. I focused on the Southeastern United States and showed the years 1970, 1980, and 1990. To do this I did separate definition queries for each year and then created a 75 mile radius buffer around the tracks of the hurricanes. I then selected by location of the counties that fell within this buffer to show which ones were most likely to be impacted by the paths of these hurricanes.  Unsurprisingly a large portion of Florida, Louisiana, and the Coast of  the Carolinas and Georgia were often within these paths. Though it does appear that the year 1990 was less active with hurricanes and mostly only affected Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. 

 

I used a similar methodology for the tornadoes but I expanded the search to the entire United States due to the large expanse of area that can be impacted by tornadoes throughout the year. I chose to look at the same years here as I did with the hurricanes: 1970, 1980, and 1990. For the tornadoes I reduced the buffer zone to 10 miles around the tornado due the fact that tornadoes often affect a smaller area within an individual storm. I then did the same with the select by location and contained it to 10 miles from each tornado. For both the hurricanes and tornadoes I included census data and showed the the population and normalized it by total population for each year to give a better idea of how many people were affected based on the density of the population within each county.