Impervious Surface Analysis Tool
Features
- Calculates the percent impervious area and total impervious surface area of each selected polygon
- Categorizes polygons to represent conditions of good, fair, and poor water quality based on calculated imperviousness
- Incorporates land cover change scenarios to examine how changes influence impervious surfaces
Overview
The Impervious Surface Analysis Tool (ISAT), a custom suite of easy-to-use scripts for ArcGIS, is used to calculate the percentage of impervious surface area within user-selected geographic areas, such as watersheds, municipalities, and subdivisions. ISAT uses imperviousness values to categorize areas as having good, fair, or poor water quality. A correlation between an increase in impervious surfaces and a decrease in water quality has been well established, and ISAT users may find the information derived from ISAT helpful in predicting how different management scenarios might impact local water quality.