How do major disruptive events (e.g. hurricanes) affect the quality of the data?
There is no specific answer to this question as each case is different. However, a recent report investigates the issue for major hurricanes in 2005. In “The Impact of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma on Business Establishments”, (Journal of Business Valuation and Economic Loss Analysis, 2009 Vol 4, Issue 2) Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda show that GIS based estimates of the economic impact of the 2005 hurricanes provide a more accurate characterization of affected businesses than estimates constructed from county level data or census block level data. Their methodology relies on mapping business establishments into damage zones defined by remote sensing information provided by FEMA. Their GIS-based estimates indicate the amount of damage using traditional methods is overestimated by as much as 2.1 times when using census block data and as much as 5.6 times when using county based data.
