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Using FME to Prepare Data for Analysis

Safe Software Inc.
September 23, 20092 min
See how FME is used to perform land use development displacement analyses.

Ricondo & Associates, a full-service aviation consulting firm has been performing land use development displacement analyses for the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority.

Under California state law, the Airport Authority is required to develop Airport Land Use Compatibility Plans (ALUCPs) for all public use and military airports in San Diego County. The purpose of the ALUCPs is to help establish policies for airport compatible land use in communities surrounding airports that help maintain the safety of people both on the ground and in the air. As the intensity (allowable # of people) and the density (allowable # of dwellings) per acre planned for by local agencies within areas subject to the ALUCP may be limited by its adoption, it is necessary to identify the total area of any land use — residential, agricultural, commercial/industrial, and/or public use — that would be potentially displaced in the affected community through adoption of the ALUCP.

To conduct the analysis, Chris Jones and Khalid Siddiqi, Senior Consultants at Ricondo, determined which uses would or would not be allowed for each parcel under the zoning ordinances of affected communities. They then equated those uses to land uses identified in the proposed ALUCPs and calculated the difference in allowable area based on the design standards under both the zoning ordinances and the proposed ALUCPs. They used FME to bring together over 14 different data sets — everything from zoning designations, airport noise contours to safety zones — and overlayed this information on parcel data for areas around the airports. Once all the required details were compiled for each parcel, it was easy to determine which parcels, if any, had potential displacement. FME was then used to move this information into Microsoft Access® and Excel® files that allowed for quick and efficient manual calculation of potential displacement loss.

To get more details on how FME was used to facilitate this analysis for the McClellan-Palomar Airport in San Diego, view Chris and Khalid’s presentation at the 2009 FME International User Conference.

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