Module 4: Coastal Flooding

 This week turned out to be truly challenging and tested all my skills in GIS. Most of the programs I was trying to run weren't running correctly and every time I tried to come up with the required answers they were completely off. I kept feeling like I was merging files wrong while following the instructions and they just didn't work out right for me for what felt like the entire time. The first two analysis's were pretty  easy and we did something that I feel I am pretty familiar with from doing a lot of dirt work in the past. We were determining erosion and damaged areas in New Jersey. This involved analyzing the maps to see where the most damage was and why. I felt I could see the spots where excess water was channeling causing more things to wash out. I feel that this insight helps out tremendously for judging the possibilities or results of things that have happened. It can be hard to always imagine a scenario when seeing it on paper/screen but when already having a first hand experience of it in real life I feel like that helps out quite a bit. Most of the assignment was plugging in data and discerning the results in various formats. The real problem came when doing analysis 3 which was storm surge in Florida. The instructions just didn't seem to pan out right for me and all my data came out way off from what it was supposed to be. This caused me a great deal of resetting and starting over again. It ended up causing me to be quite late but I was able to get the maps down to the best of my ability. The biggest problem for me came when trying to plug in the data and find out the count for commercial buildings, sheds, garages, etc. I couldn't seem to get my grid code down right so that I could search all my numbers properly. Then when I finally did the programs ran incredibly slow which caused me to miss my deadline unfortunately. But eventually I was able to get it right and learned a great deal more about trouble shooting in ArcGIS. Overall I would say this week is the hardest I've had to do yet and I learned quite a bit. I look forward to the next weeks!