LA Station Fire of 2009

The assignment this week was based on the LA Station Fire of 2009. This was an extensive fire that sadly took the life of two firefighters. What I chose to focus on was the risk popular locations, retail centers, and recreational areas faced during this fire by looking at how closely the fire came to these areas. I also wanted to look at the damage of LA's county parks from this fire. In 2009, 336,020 acres of land burned in California and 160,577 of those burned acres were attributed to the Station Fire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_California_wildfires).

The Station Fire began in the Angeles National Forrest in Los Angeles, California burning 85,000 acres overnight and threated the Angeles Crest Highway by Mt. Wilson on August 31, 2009(MolinaGenaroLATimes2009,August,31). Here is a map I created showing the slope of LA County area, highlighting the county parks in dark green and water bodies in blue. I overlaid the fire perimeters by day on the parks to show the progression of destruction the fire took to the park.

Hot humid weather contributed to the massive growth of this fire with temperatures in the triple digits. NBC reported on August 31, 2009 that 4 dozen structures were destroyed and thousands more were threatened. The United States Department of Agriculture reports that 89 residences were destroyed and 13 were damaged, 26 commercial buildings were destroyed with 22 commercial buildings damaged. Outbuildings that were destroyed totaled 94 structures and 22 were damaged. Here are two maps I created to show, first, the LA County area with retail centers, recreation areas, and popular places marked and the second map has the Station Fire by day overlaid on top of these popular places. With the massive damage this fire inflicted, these maps show how closely the fire came to causing even more damage. Winds were mild which was the number one factor in the Station Fire not reaching the suburban areas of LA.

 

 

 

 

Here is a third map of the same information but overlaid on the hillshade for a different view:

The estimated damage of this fire is estimated by the USDA of being $95,3000,000. In total the Station Fire burned approximately 161,000 acres. 154,000 acres of Forest Service System and 6,700 acres of private lands were burned by the fire (http://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/angeles/home/?cid=stelprdb5318306).

 

The United States Government Accountability Office created an official report on the Station Fire in 2011. This report cited arson as the cause of this fire and flammable vegetation for exacerbating the spread of wildfire. It is so sad to hear of all the damage and destruction caused by arson. This was an unnecessary occurrence that had negative affects on wildlife, agriculture, structures and people's lives. It was a horrible and tragic fire in which firefighters risked their lives and some lost their lives. In the end they were able to stop the fire and contain it 100%. 

I really enjoyed learning about this fire and mapping different aspects of it. I am getting better and better at adding new layers and downloading new information to add to ArcGIS. I really like to manipulate the data so it emphasizes exactly what I want to show.

Works Cited:

http://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/angeles/home/?cid=stelprdb5318306

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/32615136/ns/us_news-life/#.Uw9rvd_TnZ4

 

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_California_wildfires

http://www.gao.gov/assets/590/587075.pdf 

 

Mount Spokane Maps

This weeks assignment was to find an area we found interesting from the USGS website and use that map image to manipulate different views. I chose Mount Spokane!

Here is a map of what the first image looked like:

Next I took this image and looked at the hillshade of the same area:

Here is a map of the slope of the mountain:



 



A map of the aspect of Mount Spokane:

 

 

 

This was so cool! We got to make a 3D image of our map!!!

 

 





How cool is that?! I had a lot of fun moving the mountain around so that I could see the land changes easily. I really like how the color scale shows emphasizes the image and how the white looks like it represents snow up on the mountain! I was up snowshoeing on Mount Spokane last  weekend and doing this assignment makes me want to go again! It is really neat to see how manipulating maps emphasizes what information you want to portray. From one image I was able to change the way the map looked drastically just by viewing it in different aspects. Creating the 3D image was my favorite part!

Extent information:

Top 39.8291666661

Left -105.78888888889

Right -10.969444445

Bottom 39.38388888883

 

 

 

Spatial Reference GCS_North_American_1983

Angular Unit Degree (0.0174532925199433)

 

 

Washington DC to Kabul

This week's assignment was to look at how a maps distortion can affect the data we receive from maps. Pictured above was the starting map with Washington DC and Kabul. The distance on this map between Washington DC and Kabul was 6,934.478105 miles. Once the map projection changed so did the distance between the cities.

Here is a map using the Mercator projection. Washington DC and Kabul are still marked on this map but when measured the distance is different from the original map. The distance using the Mercator projection was 10,122.118968 miles.

The map here is using the Cylindrical Equal Area projection. Again using Washington DC and Kabul as two distances marked on the map the distance changes. The distance for the Cylindrical Equal Area projection is 10,108.051114 miles.

This last map projection is using the Equidistant Conic projection. Although this map looks the most unique of the maps used, to me it looks most like a globe. The distance between Washington DC and Kabul using the Equidistant and Conic projection was 6,957.649334 miles.

This activity was very interesting to me. I really enjoyed seeing how different projections can affect the final distance measured between two distances. This is something I think many people may not be aware of yet it can have a significant affect on them. This was a really fun assignment to complete!

Census Map

My two Census Maps

These are the two census maps that I was able to complete. I ran into some issues trying to create my own maps using census data. The first issue I ran into was saving my data from the previous week incorrectly and having to start the tutorial over again. After I had started over and was almost done with the tutorial I ran into issues joining. Dr. Dvorak attempted to help me join new data or even to join some of the data from the week 6 tutorial and was unable to. She told me to post the maps I was able to complete and write about the difficulties to complete the join.
It seems that the program was being very finicky when attempting to join data. Every time the join was attempted it failed. We were unsure why this was occurring. There was also difficulty when substituting values and having them default to values that I did not want to use.
All in all I found working with the census data very difficult and frustrating. I can appreciate the use of the maps when they are completed successfully and think they are very useful. I really like how data can be highlighted in different colors to have an easy visual of data. I think GIS is really beneficial to better understand the world around us. This exercise in GIS was really neat to see how data can be manipulated to highlight different races, years or numbers of people using census data. I wish the program would have been a little easier to work with so I could have joined data. I really appreciated Dr. Dvorak taking so much time to help me try to join tables and data and found it unfortunate we were able to successfully join the tables.