Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Approach
Geography 469
Spring 2010
Goal and Purpose
• Scott Beard, Plans Examiner for City of Tacoma, manually produced Kzt factors
for King County and City of Tacoma
• Will Rugg, GIS Analyst for Snohomish County Planning and Development
Services, interested in how to automate the process via ArcGIS
• Our group decided to take on this topic in order to challenge our knowledge of
how to apply GIS to real world problems
Kzt Factor Significance
• Kzt = (1 + K1 + K2 + K3)2
• K 1 = determined from table below
• K2 = (1 – (|x|/µLh))
• K3= e-γz/Lh
Parameters for Speed-Up over Hills and Escarpments
Exposure µ
Hill Shape γ Upwind of Crest Downwind of Crest
B C D
Source: American Society of Civil Engineers: Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures, 2006
Need-to-Know Questions
2. Based off of the mid-points, what is the velocity pressure constant (Kzt
factor) of the terrain?
• From here we used the Identify tool to find the exact elevations for the
the base and peak polygons of our landforms
• We created lines and points to keep track of our calculations, which were
recorded in an Excel spreadsheet
• Due to the specifications of the Kzt formula, only 4 landforms were able
to be selected for calculation