Lab 7

In this lab, we worked in obtaining data for some of the LA county fires that occurred in the month of 2009. All the data was collected from the resources below. Some of the resources actually had files that could be downloaded on ArcGIS so that it fits on the same LA county map. I took several parameters which I thought were important for the effects this fire could have on the environment and to the people. I included the populated places, the urban area, the airports, and the parks. I also included the fire extension on different dates.

I included the populated place because a big fire could have an important effect on people. A fire like this could make the people leave the area because it could create a lot of problems. For the people that live in the area where the fire occurred, it could easily endanger their lives. Then, I also had an interest on the urban area because with this fire, it could easily damage a lot of the urban landscape which is probably the most important area for anyone. Then, the airports. I plotted the airports for 2 reasons: the first one is to know if the planes were possible sources for those fires and the second is are the fire in proximity to the airports? The effects could be disastrous. Then, the parks. I included them because a lot of people spend their leisure time at parks so this is to see the effects on the environment.

I felt the fire extension was a very important point for this map. I feel this is very important because of the evolution the fire has within a span of a few days. We can see that at the end of August, the fire is relatively small. However we can see that a few days later at the beginning of September, the fire perimeter has dramatically increased which can have disastrous effects on the environment.

To be more precise, I took some data from the LA times. On August 31st, 2 firefighters got killed and 85000 acres got destroyed overnight. 18 homes were lost during that night and plenty of neighborhoods had to be evacuated. More than 12000 homes were threatened and 6000 had to be evacuated. The consequences of this fire last summer were absolutely dramatic. This is why the LA fire department has taken measures and create a wildfire action fire plan in case a fire like this occurs again.

As we all know, the consequences of a fire can have absolutely devastating consequences for the people and the environment we live in. However, by taking measures, less damages could be produced. Using ArcGIS, we have a good estimation of what the consequences of a fire can be by looking at its progress over several days. Using the data collected from the internet, we see what gets affected because of those fires.

Resources:

Title: LA County Enterprise GIS

Website: http://gis.lacounty.gov/eGIS/?cat=11

Title: California Department of Forestry and Fire protection

Website: http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/

Title: UCLA's spatial data repository

Website: http://gis.ats.ucla.edu/Mapshare/

Title: L.A. County fire doubles in size; more homes destroyed; Mt. Wilson threatened [Updated]

Website: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/08/la-county-fire-doubles-in-size-more-homes-list-mt-wilson-threatened.html

Title: Ready! Set! Go!

Website: http://www.fire.lacounty.gov/SafetyPreparedness/readysetgo/home.asp

lab 6

The area I chose was approximately in Los Angeles. The extent information are approximately at 34.03 degrees North and 118.15 degrees West. The extent in degrees was approximately from 0 to 46 degrees. We had to change the units from degrees to meters because of the wrong units that was used as default

Lab 5

Map projection is important in the world of geography. There is no way that geographers could always work with a spherical globe every time they have to make distance measurements. The spherical globe is very important as it is the best approximation of the earth but there must also be some alternatives. This is why we have so many types of map projections. When I was young to study the French and European map, we always used the equidistant cylindrical map. This map is very useful because it is equidistant and the easiest to understand and to make measurements.

It is very easy to understand because we are working in two dimensions and we could just make straight line measurements between two cities. Even though this easiness is very attractive for working with maps, it can be quite inaccurate for actual distances because it is a poor approximation of the world. For example, if you want to fly from Washington DC to Kabul, you are not going to go straight going through France and Germany and other European countries to reach Kabul. You would actually go North to Greenland and Iceland as this is the fastest way to get to Kabul considering spherical maps.

The cylindrical view is not the only view we can use. Another very useful projection is the equidistant conic view. It is another type of equidistant projection. Here we have a view on the North pole and flatten the earth. It is very similar to the cylindrical view but the North pole is at the center. The conformal maps are more accurate than the equidistant but there are less intuitive. the Mercator and equidistant cylindrical are very similar except that the Mercator is more accurate and has more distortion. The Robinson projection is a map with spherical shape but in two dimensions instead of three. Another type is the equal area projection where countries and continents seem to have obviously an equal area. This is the least intuitive of all maps in my opinion.

As we saw above, there are many type of map projections that exist. For our class, we divided them into three groups: equidistant, equal area and conformal. We also saw that the equidistant projection is very intuitive but not very accurate while the conformal is more accurate, it is less intuitive because of the distortions. All map projections have a particular purpose: it could be for accuracy, intuition or other types such as the equal area projection. It is not very intuitive because of the heavy distortion. Any map projection has its own purpose

Geography 7 Lab 4

This experience of learning ArcGis was interesting. The tutorial took a long time, but that time spent on leaning a little bit about this software was worth it. Since I was very young, I learned geography back when I was in France simply because it was one of the major requirements there. Since I am a very scientific person (I am an electrical engineering major), and I learned geography since I was young, I know very well what everything we are learning is all about and the importance of understanding maps.

However, this class about geographical information systems is more than just learning maps. I knew when I was a kid that we could make maps. I could make them by hand or use special machines from satellites to camera to take pictures of the entire earth or part of a city. Ten to fifteen years ago, after Internet became popular and starting to become widely usable, I realized that many of those pictures taken could be found on the Internet with much more accuracy than with a camera. Being able to export pictures with great accuracy is great but the invention of one with the same accuracy was a tough challenge faced by engineers, especially computer scientists. After years of work, computer scientists were finally able to create softwares that enable us to create any type of map we desire with perfect accuracy to the human eye. One of the softwares was ArcGIS, which is the software we use for this class.

Using ArcGIS, you can make any map about any topic. It is possible that I could use this software later in my electrical engineering studies if I have to make map of the world showing the areas where the largest amount of semiconductor chips are made for example. In our case, we used an example of the proposed airport expansions. In the first map, we made a map showing the school and noise contour because of the effects of the surrounding airport. Then in that map, we created a road connecting other roads that avoids the school area. In the second map, we made a more detailed analysis of the land use and noise contour where we had different colors representing the amount of noise in the specific area that we are working on. To show even more detail, we made a bar graph of the number of parcels at different areas. In the last graph, we considered a very important and obvious map to include: the population density map.

In this lab, we made different maps with different subjects but are all linked to each other if we look at the big picture. We see here that using software to make maps are very useful in research subjects for school but also in real life. It could be very useful for people working on history as well as the people working in engineering. This tutorial showed us the wide quantity of functions that the ArcGIS software has and we will see in the next few weeks how this sofware can be applied to any topic in real life concerning maps. This is why we have a project at the end of the quarter that will use the ArcGIS software.