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Impervious Surface Analysis Tool

NOAA Coastal Services Center

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

output from the Impervious Surface Analysis Tool (ISAT) using arcgis 10The 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.

Live technical assistance is available for this tool.