Final Update 12/17

Blog Post #7

I'm very excited to post my final poster. Since the beginning of this process my goals and objectives for my final poster have grown and changed. When I figured out that their wasn't hurricane track data readily available for people to use, I switched my focus to digitizing major hurricanes over the last 20 years. As stated on my poster, I chose a Category 1 and a Category 4 (or 5, depending on what occurred) giving me 2 per year. I chose the years 2003, 2008, 2013, and 2017. The exception was 2013, when there were no hurricanes that touched down in North America greater than a tropical storm. I'm very excited that I was able to digitize so many hurricanes, since it took a lot of leg work! I had to locate the hurricane coordinate points for each hurricane track, enter them into excel, transfer them to ArcMap, and digitize the lines! 

Future work I would like to accomplish would be to compare hurricanes to temperature and wind speed on the ocean to see if there are any correlations!

Update 12/6

Blog Post #6 -

PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE !!

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

Maps from a-h:

    a. Hurricane Andrea (2013)

    b. Hurricane Claudette (2003)

    c. Hurricane Dorian (2013)

    d. Hurricane Gustav (2008)

    e. Hurricane Hanna (2008)

    f. Hurricane Harvey (2017)

    g. Hurricane Isabel (2003)

    h. Hurricane Nate (2017)

I finally was able to get my excel sheet into ArcGIS correctly, I then converted the points into lines (which is what you see here!)

For wrapping up, I will be changing the map colors and finalizing the map layouts for the poster!! 

Update 11/27

Blog Post #5 - Update

This weeks update is small, I have found all of my data and downloaded everything, since we have just gotten back from break I haven't done much with my new data.


The only snag I have run into is that I have to manually type all of the coordinate points for each hurricane track into an excel file to upload to ArcGIS. This is this weeks battle, once I get this done, I will enter it into ArcGIS and start creating the hurricane lines.

Here's an animation of Hurricane Harvey, one of the hurricanes I will be looking at and drawing into ArcMap.

Update for 11/8

Blog Post #4 - Update

Over the past few weeks, I have successfully downloaded sea surface temperatures from NASA's website! Big accomplishment!!

I ran into trouble with my hurricane track data, a lot of the attribute fields had values of "-999", which Dr. M let me know meant there was no data. Running into this problem was frustrating, so I moved on to try and find new data, which wasn't as easy a task as I thought it would be.

Since then, I have located data for hurricane tracks, I will have to load it into an excel file and then upload that data to GIS, these are point locations, so I will also have to add the polylines to show the full track.

Now that I have worked through all of the technical issues, over the next 2 weeks I will be uploading my data and synthesizing the polylines on top of the temperature data.

In the end, I plan on now having new deliverable's.

I would like to take 2005, 2010, and 2015 hurricane seasons (July-October), synthesize at least 1 hurricane (depending on how long this takes per track) maybe 2, and compare these to each other.

Ultimately, if I am correct, we should see an increase in hurricane duration, and an increase in category type AND an increase in sea surface temperatures.

11/1/17 Update

Blog Post 3 - Update

This week, I ran into some trouble with my hurricane data. I found it is really hard to decipher all of the attribute data, to correct this problem, I will look for the metadata to figure out what it all means. I have started to breakdown the data by month, and I have also started looking for new hurricane data in case I can't find the metadata I need.

Right now the temperature layer of this project has taken a back seat, since its been difficult to find a suitable layer, but I will continue to look for the right data.

So far no questions, but I'll post them if I have any!

10/18/17 Update

Blog Post 2 - Update

This past week I have been trying to locate my data sources, I was easily able to find my hurricane data off of NOAA's website. However it has been difficult to find average sea surface temperature data by year. However I did find data for average temperature by month. 

This next week I plan to narrow down what months are considered hurricane season. By doing this I will be able to use the month by month data for temperature, and not have an enormous number of maps to make. 

Since I am having trouble finding the yearly average, I think I will have to use the month average data. A question I have is, since I will be doing multiple months of multiple years, how do I narrow it down to specific years without skewing my data? Can I randomly pick years to look at or is there another way to do this? I don't want to have to create hundreds of maps to show every single year. 

Project Proposal

Hurricane Activity and Sea Surface Temps

Introduction:

Over the past fifty years we have seen a dramatic rise in sea surface temperatures. With the rise in temperatures, comes the inevitable warming of the ice caps in the north, this causes sea levels to rise. A major problem with sea level rise is that a coastal community becomes more vulnerable to flooding. In the past fifty years it appears that the number of high category hurricanes in the US have increased. These storms have devastating affects on coastal communities, including storm surge flooding. Specifically, we have seen an increase in devastating high category hurricanes in the southeast region of the United States.

Objectives:

• Map sea surface temperatures and category 3&4 hurricane activity in the Southeastern portion of the United States - including approx. 50 years ago compared to 25 years ago and current 2017 data.
• Assess if there is a relationship between increased surface temperatures and number of Cat 3&4 hurricanes in that region. 

Methodology:

For this project, I plan to use downloadable GIS shapefiles to create maps in ArcGIS.

Deliverable's:

Multiple maps will be created from this research project in order to show the progression over the past 50 years of hurricane activity and sea surface temperature. This data will provide information on whether there is an increase in higher category hurricanes with the increase in sea surface temperatures.

Work Plan:

Week of Oct. 9th: Finish Project Proposal
Week of Oct. 16th: Continue to download data that will be beneficial to this research. Blog Post 2.
Week of Oct. 23rd: Create maps of a few years that have good data (Years TBD).
Week of Oct. 30th: Continue creation of maps. Process of elimination. Blog Post 3.
Week of Nov. 6th: Start to edit maps design (layout, colors, etc.) Blog Post 4.
Week of Nov. 13th: Begin analysis on correlation. Works-in-Progress Presentation.
Week of Nov. 20th: Thanksgiving Break - begin to think about final Poster
Week of Nov. 27th: Finish up analysis. Stark to design Poster. Blog Post 5.
Week of Dec. 4th: Finalize poster. Blog 6.
Week of Dec. 11th: Hand in final poster. Blog Post 7.

Data Sources:

Current Sources in use:

Knapp, K. R., M. C. Kruk, D. H. Levinson, H. J. Diamond, and C. J. Neumann, 2010:
The International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS): Unifying tropical cyclone best track data.
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 91, 363-376.
 doi:10.1175/2009BAMS2755.1 

https://www.wunderground.com/education/webster.asp

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)