This week we were to look at Key West, Florida's flooding from Hurricane Wilma's storm surge. I was initially panicked, owing to the fact that I did Project 2 first because it wasn't clear to me whether to do both 1 and 2 but I certainly needed to do 2, and only afterwards did I find the Project 1 work doc (I had thought I had printed out all the docs from both projects and hence had all the instructions I had to go on, but apparently not) which explained pretty much everything I should have done. In any case, I did come up with all the deliverables for project 2, although the table and graph are from Excel since it was quicker and the Project 2 directions didn't specify requirements for creating the table/graph). When I got to the second quiz, the one focusing on Hurricane Katrina, I discovered the Project 1 work doc and worked through that to get to the answers I needed. It made the route a lot clearer. Ah, hindsight...
We had to display a map of elevation and bathymetry of Key West, which showed how low the island is. After this we had to determine what proportion of the island was flooded by an 8-foot storm surge, and make a graph of the flooded land by landcover type. Key West turns out to be heavily developed (densely networked with streets and classified as developed land) across nearly the whole island (the landcover map is the 2nd map on this blog). All I know about the Florida Keys comes from Carl Hiaasen, so this was a surprise to me - but correspondingly, most of the land that was affected was developed land. Only two areas were free of water and both were quite small.
Moreover, all but one of Key West's churches and schools, both of its hospitals and its only airfield are in the low-lying (under 8 feet) area (see the first map). This was a surprise to me too. I don't know how many hurricanes have hit the Keys but there must have been a few and there are certain to be more in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment