METHODS
Data from this project was taken from multiple sources, with the largest being the City of Houston’s ArcGIS database. Firstly, an outline of the super neighborhoods within Houston was compared to polygon data of 100-year floodplains in the city.
Based on the map above, the four Super Neighborhoods that we have found to be the most at risk for a future flooding event are the Kingswood, Kashmere Gardens, the Addicks Reservoir and the Meyerland/Braesburn/Braeswood areas. Neighborhoods were chosen for analysis based off areas that were largely covered in floodplains. Super neighborhoods were then divided amongst group members and isolated using the select features tool for individual analysis. Examples of these types of maps are provided below.
Soil Type could be an important factor in flooding events and can be an issue in developing properties as well. This is an example of how the soil data will be portrayed against the various Super Neighborhoods. Detailed descriptions of the soil types will also be added into our final assessment. Soil data was taken from the online web soil survey and all soil units as well as their descriptions were also sourced from the same site.
Elevation and Drainage levels are also an important factor in flooding and with this map shows the range of elevation types and drainages with the Super Neighborhoods of Interest. The elevation raster was obtained from the USGS DEM (10m) and was compared against floodways and drainage areas (COH database), looking for natural drainage zones.
Subsidence rates in our selected Super Neighborhoods are shown to be higher than the rest of the city and can shed some more insight on flooding events. The subsidence dataset used was provided by our in-class lab and was initially compared against the Land Use dataset from the cities’ ArcGIS database under the assumption that subsidence rate was likely the cause of human interaction.
Alongside the Subsidence Rate map is a histogram displaying a range of subsidence rates. The purpose of this histogram is to provide a visual representation of typical subsidence rates in the Houston area for future analysis. The well data that we use is widely spread across Houston while our area of study consists of finer sections so this will be useful for data interpretation.