Teaching and Learning About Hurricane Helene and Milton, and other hurricanes, with GIS
Grim, recent hurricane events shows once again how and why GIS is an effective tool for emergency response when lives are imperiled and property devastated. In education, GIS can help students at all levels and across many disciplines understand the spatial and temporal patterns of hurricanes and typhoons from global to local scales. This set of resources was written with heavy hearts for all those recently affected with an aim to help students and faculty become empowered with learning and teaching about these disastrous events.
With the advent of modern web based GIS tools and open spatial data portals, there is no shortage of resources to teach about hurricanes and typhoons. Let's just focus on resources to teach and learn about Hurricane Helene and Milton, which struck the USA in September and October 2024, and by extension, touch on other hurricanes and typhoons.
One of the best places to start is the Esri Disaster Response program, and then select > hurricanes, where you will find a real-time weather feed, the hurricane aware mapping app, and other maps and apps on Hurricane Helene, Milton, a Helene before-and-after swipe map, and others. I often use this web map in ArcGIS Online to show students the grim reminder that hurricanes are not just common to the southern USA, but occur in the Indian and Pacific Ocean as typhoons, all of which are visible here. Use this low elevation coastal zones global data set in ArcGIS Online (first, examine its metadata) to investigate the double-hazard that occurs when a hurricane strikes a coast that is at low elevation for quite a long distance inland from the coast.
Ask students to examine the pattern of hurricanes: The direction they move, the pattern of movement, and the time of year when most occur. Then, ask them to measure selected hurricane tracks. Which was longer--Helene or Milton? Add population density or a cities layer to the map and compare the hurricane tracks to populated places. Change the basemap to terrain with labels, zoom to western North Carolina, and discuss why Helene was so devastating to people living in the river valleys there. Compare that map against this dashboard showing landslides in the area.
One powerful teaching technique is to compare the single lines representing hurricanes and typhoons with selected hurricane wind swaths, such as this one for Milton, and satellite imagery (such as this NOAA site, which also explains how imagery is gathered during hurricanes). Hurricanes may be represented as single lines on some maps, but the teachable moment here is that they are so destructive because their swaths are much, much wider. Ask students to measure the width of, say, the Milton wind swath, in ArcGIS Online, which should bring some wide-eyed amazement with students, no matter what their age.
Ask students to examine this map of total rainfall across Florida from Hurricane Milton, I ask them to study the rainfall patterns, and the patterns related to population density and to cities, and then compare the amounts to annual rainfall in their own community. The amount of rain from this single storm in Florida is approximately the same as we receive in Colorado, where I work, in an entire year. That, along with articles estimating 40 trillion gallons of rain falling, is pretty staggering.
Another aspect of hurricanes is the large amount of debris they leave behind--not only human-constructed, but trees, shrubs, and other aspects of the natural world. Show this dashboard, for example, and discuss the logistics and amount of debris needed to be moved, in just this one single county in Florida. How much volume is it? Convert the volume into something understandable--would it fill an entire gymnasium? An entire stadium? Multiple stadiums? Where is the debris moved FROM, and where is it moved TO? What happens to the debris afterward? Is it covered, converted into recyclable material, is the vegetation separated from the human-constructed debris so it can be converted into biofuels?
If you need a ready-made lesson and more background readings focused on hazards with GIS, see the learn ArcGIS library documentation, the geoinquiries collection, and my colleague Dr Tomaszewski's book on GIS for Disaster Management.
Another powerful aspect to teaching and learning with GIS is that students and faculty are not confined to just consuming information that others have mapped, but they can create their own maps and apps using ArcGIS Instant apps, story maps, dashboards, experience builder, and other fascinating, powerful, yet easy-to-configure tools. This set of lessons I wrote, for example, guides you through many of these tools.
This article touches on just a few resources; many more can be investigated using data libraries such as via this search in ArcGIS Online, on local, regional, national, and international data hub sites, via Esri sites such as this one, and via other data portals.
It's easy to get discouraged when examining the extent of natural disasters such as these, and so I close with these ideas: 1. Using the case studies on the Esri disaster pages and those you find elsewhere, show how GIS tools are helping people plan resiliency before disasters strike, provide emergency services while disasters are occurring, and plan recovery efforts after the storm ends. GIS really is a technology that benefits the planet, and show additional example on this GIS for Good set of pages. 2. Discuss with students how they might become involved with helping after these disasters occur: Crowdsourced mapping efforts, through relief agencies, contributing their GIS expertise, and in other ways. I keep thinking of what Mr Rogers always told kids on his show after a disaster, "always look for the helpers."
Selected images and mapping tools described in this essay.
--Joseph Kerski