Title: Texas Blackout: Analyzing affected areas & socioeconomic factors that influenced recovery in 2021

🤠 Author: Flora Hamilton | [email protected]

📦 Repo Link: https://github.com/floraham/texas-blackout

This Github repository contains a .RMD file conducting an analysis of Texas's blackout impacts and recovery in 2021. We use 4 types of datasets to conduct this analysis.

Context

"In February 2021, Texas faced a significant power crisis resulting from three severe winter storms that swept across the United States on February 10--11, 13--17, and 15--20."¹

Objectives and methods of project:

• Estimate the number of households in Houston that experienced power loss due to the initial two storms. - To determine the count of homes affected by power outages, we will spatially join these areas with OpenStreetMap data on buildings and roads.

• Investigate whether socioeconomic factors serve as predictors of community recovery from a power outage.

  • For the exploration of potential socioeconomic factors influencing recovery, the analysis will be linked with data from the US Census Bureau.

Data

✨ Nightlights VNP46A1

• This analysis will rely on remotely-sensed night lights data acquired from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the Suomi satellite. Specifically, we will use the VNP46A1 to identify variations in night lights before and after the storms, pinpointing areas that lost electrical power.

🛣️ Roads gis_osm_roads_free_1.gpkg

• We used Geofabrik's download sites to retrieve a shapefile of all highways in Texas and prepared a Geopackage (.gpkg file) containing just the subset of roads that intersect the Houston metropolitan area. 

🏡 Houses gis_osm_buildings_a_free_1.gpkg

• We also obtain building data from OpenStreetMap. We again downloaded from Geofabrick and prepared a GeoPackage containing only houses in the Houston metropolitan area.\

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Socioeconomic ACS_2019_5YR_TRACT_48.gdb

• We obtained data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for census tracts in 2019. The folder ACS_2019_5YR_TRACT_48.gdb is an ArcGIS "file geodatabase"

💪 Spatial Skills:

• load vector/raster data\
• simple raster operations\
• simple vector operations\
• spatial joins

Repository Structure

Houston-Blackouts
│   README.md
│   Rmd/Proj files
|   .gitignore     
│
└───data
    │───gis_osm_buildings_a_free_1.gpkg
    │───gis_osm_roads_free_1.gpkg
    │
    └───ACS_2019_5YR_TRACT_48_TEXAS.gdb
    |   └  census gdb files
    |
    └───VNP46A1
        └ VIIRS night-light files

Data Download Instructions

！ The data associated with this assignment is too large to include in the GitHub repo. Data should be stored locally and added to .gitignore file. Download data from here

Footnotes

1. Wikipedia. 2021. "2021 Texas power crisis." Last modified October 2, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis. ↩