I am trying to draw multiple buffer rings around polygons in QGIS, but have an additional layer of complexity that is confusing me. I want to draw buffer rings (well not really rings since they are all sorts of polygon shapes) around polygons from a single layer, and keep drawing those rings until a certain threshold value is reached. This would mean that each polygon would have a different number of buffer rings around it. I am trying to figure out if I can do this with tools within QGIS or if this will ultimately require some scripting.
Here is an example to be more specific:
I have a layer of polygons representing factories, where I want to measure the pollution impact of each factory. In this simple example, we reason that the bigger a factory is, the more pollution impact it will have, specifically referring to how far out the pollution will spread. So there are 2 layers I am dealing with here. I have a raster layer of CO2 concentration, and then on top of that, I have my factory polygons layer. The idea is that for each factory, the pollution impact will be strong close to the factory, and then spread out, but after a certain distance, the effect will start to get diluted and fade away. (I of course realize that pollution transport is way more complex than this, and that the ways pollution can travel long distances is very complex and is affected by many different variables, but this example is just for simply understanding the concept I am trying to communicate). What I want to do is take the average CO2 concentration of each polygon ring for each factory, and keep finding the average of each ring going outward, until I reach the point where the next buffer ring is actually worse air quality than the previous buffer (going by average CO2 concentration). This point would serve as a sort-of threshold. For each factory polygon, I want to find this inflection point where the pollution effect has disappeared. The inflection point would be the distance of that buffer from the polygon. I would set my buffer rings to 10 meters apart from one another.
I unfortunately do not have reproducible work to show yet, since I am still trying to figure out how this challenge should be approached, and what tools I would actually need. Can this be done in QGIS?
For reference, I am trying to find a way to replicate the methods developed in this paper that deals with the cooling impact of green spaces: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204621000062
