USING GIS TO MAP AND TRACK HURRICANES

This presentation will describe the use of GIS in the development of a set of tropical storm and hurricane tracking maps in an undergraduate introductory GIS course. Students in this course typically have no prior knowledge of how GIS software works, and there are no prerequisites for the course. Approximately half of the students in this course are geosciences majors, while the other half consists of majors in the biological sciences or environmental studies. Since there is a wide range of scientific knowledge in this class, a topic more intermediate between geosciences and biosciences is used, namely meteorology. Students spend the first three weeks of the semester mapping a recent hurricane using data collected from one of several websites. The first lab exercise introduces students to basic mapping with GIS. Depending upon the location of the most recent hurricane, students acquire base map data along the U.S. Gulf Coast or the U.S.-Mexico Pacific Coast. This map data is provided by the instructor, although the map layout design is up to the student. This base map is used in the next week’s exercise which examines thematic data. Again, depending upon the hurricane and its location, students acquire thematic data from various federal government web sites (USGS, FEMA, NOAA NHC, etc.). This second GIS exercise also introduces students to quantitative mapping and the use of color in mapping different statistical areas. The final map uses the same regional base map created during the first week’s exercise. Storm positions based on the latitude and longitude of NOAA NHC storm reports are mapped, along with tropical storm and hurricane force wind swaths, storm wind speeds, and speed of movement. Along the way, students learn about tropical meteorology and how these storms are forecasted and tracked. The final map is a color layout showing the storm’s evolution with detailed text and labels added to the map. These exercises have been used for several years, and have proven very effective in introducing students to GIS software and how it is used to create professional-quality maps of important scientific phenomena.