GIS portfolio

I have a master's in GIS and most of my research has a geographic-scale aggregation problem hiding inside it somewhere. The pieces below are the parts of that work that stand on their own outside of a paper.

Texas snowstorm impact analysis

Class project from the planning sequence: looking at the spatial pattern of power outages in Texas after the February 2021 cold snap, geocoded against utility-territory boundaries and tract-level demographics. The headline finding (which is now established in the published literature too) is that the outage spatial pattern was orthogonal to the temperature pattern, which is a polite way of saying the grid failed where the political map said it would fail, not where the cold map said it would fail. Final project PDF.

Visualization for planning (group project)

A municipal planning project that asked the team to produce the kind of dossier an actual municipal client could read end-to-end: spatial analysis, design concepts, supporting figures, narrative. The deliverable was the kind of thing I now ask MBA students to imitate when they need to produce a public-facing brief from technical work. Final submission PDF.

LiDAR building identification

A small piece on using LiDAR-derived elevation data to identify building footprints. Mostly a demonstration of the data pipeline; the underlying problem (deriving footprints from raw point clouds) is a solved one in the literature but a useful one to have run from scratch. The point of the exercise is that I have, in fact, run it from scratch.

Ongoing geospatial work

The bigger geospatial projects are now embedded in the research papers themselves. Paper 5 (Effective Distance) is a multi-modal least-cost-path construction across WorldPop / GHS-POP / HRSL gridded population, VIIRS nightlights, and OpenStreetMap transport networks for 200 countries over 25 years. The EffDist V2026 dataset page has the technical details.

The PDFs above are migrating from the older ianhelfrich.com WordPress site. If a link is broken, email me and I'll send the file directly.