The Development of an Empirical Workflow Process for Mapping Affected Communities of the Hurricane Felix, Nicaragua, 2007

Abstract

In September 2007, the Hurricane Felix devastated the North-eastern of Nicaragua, near the Caribbean coast. The hurricane heavily affected about 400 communities from a total of 777 registered in this region. As part of the post-disaster relief measures, INETER (The National Geosciences Institute) in collaboration with other Nicaraguan agencies was requested to elaborate a GIS-based inventory for the analysis of the impact of the hurricane.
The information about the affected communities by Hurricane Felix was gathered by the Civil Defence of the Nicaraguan Army. Unfortunate, the field staff had no GPS available, and in the best cases, the national topographic maps have been used to reference the affected settlements. Problems of georeferencing made it necessary to create an empirical workflow process in order to produce the affectation maps using several information sources.
This paper describes the approach developed to design a workflow that allows the georeferencing of 64% of the reported sites. The remaining 36% were at least identified as belonging to a certain community in or near the affectation zone indicated.