Book cover image for second edition of the book Exercise 7-1: 311 Hurricane Harvey Call Data Heat Mapping with Kernel Density

This is the companion website for Exercise 7-1: 311 Hurricane Harvey Call Data Heat Mapping with Kernel Density from the book Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Disaster Management (second edition). This page contains video walkthroughs of the exercise, datasets associated with the exercise, and other additional materials.

Follow this link to access Exercise 7-1: 311 Hurricane Harvey Call Data Heat Mapping with Kernel Density datasets:

About Exercise 7-1: 311 Hurricane Harvey Call Data Heat Mapping with Kernel Density

Skill Level: intermediate

Estimated time to complete: 2-3 hours

Additional resources needed: an Internet-connected computer, a zip tool, ArcGIS Pro 2.x (with Spatial Analyst license) or QGIS 3.x., Exercise 7-1 datasets you can download here.

Purpose: the purpose of this lab will be for you gain experience and knowledge of developing heat maps related to a disaster-response event.

Additional notes:

  1. ArcGIS Pro and QGIS have different ways of creating heat maps. This exercise focuses on using the kernel density tools of each program as opposed to using heat map renderers.

Learning Objectives: after completing the exercise, you will know:

  • how to use a kernel density tool;
  • how to visually represent and map point data as a heat map based on outputs from a kernel density mapping tool.

Deliverables: if you are completing this exercise for a class assignment, you can submit a screenshot of your response to the instruction questions.

Overview: 2017’s Hurricane Harvey was particularly notable for the massive volume of precipitation that was recorded in the Houston, Texas, metropolitan area over a relatively short period of 2 days: visit the National Weather Service Hurricane Harvey Info webpage for more information. Houston, like many major metropolitan areas in the United States, offers a 311 service that is used for non-emergency calls to government officials.During Harvey, the city of Houston recorded several 311 calls related to citizens’ reports on flooding activity in Houston. In this exercise, you work with the actual 311 datasets that were collected during Harvey from the City of Houston. In particular, you will work with a subset of the Harvey 311 call data from Houston where citizen specifically reported flooding. Heat mapping will be used to see where citizen reports of flooding were most frequent. The datasets used in this exercise were originally obtained from the City of Houston 311 and then modified for this exercise in terms of creating a filtered dataset subset that was converted to a projected shapefile that is needed for the various tools used with the exercise. To obtain the original, full datasets used in this exercise, see www.houstontx.gov/311/.

Corrections:

  • Page 315: Task 3: Visually Represent Kernel Density Tool Outputs. For the QGIS ten-class equal-interval classification, eighth class (Label 237), ninth class (Label 267), and tenth class (Label inf) opacity values should each be 100% and not 0%.

For detailed exercise instructions, purchase the book from Routledge Press »

Exercise 7-1: 311 Hurricane Harvey Call Data Heat Mapping with Kernel Density Video Walkthroughs

ArcGIS Pro Walkthrough

QGIS Walkthrough


Additional Resources

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