GEOGRAPHY 7 LAB 7

Fire is a naturally occurring phenomenon which humans have learned to deal with throughout history. When fire burns uncontrollably, it became a source for disaster to all environmental areas. The Los Angeles Station Fire august/September 2009 is an example of such tragedy. According to statistics, the first "big one" happened in December of 1927 and since then more than 20 catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles County have happened. This was the lesson for local government to begin organized fire protection.

The wildfire, called the Station Fire was considered as a tragedy in Los Angeles County. During about 50 days it devastate 160,577 acres of land, destroyed 89 homes and 209 structures, scrub oak and mature trees and destroying three dozen cabins inside the Angeles National Forest, 1. The reason for this fire are different including local natural sources and hypothesis about terrorists action. As mentioned by US Forest Service intense heat caused the soil to 'seal' itself , drys and becam easily fire able. The final cost was estimated $93 million only for environment ,plus much more for home owner it this areas.

Basic Information.

Incident Type- Wildfire
Cause - Arson
Date of Origin Wednesday August 26th, 2009 approx. 03:30 PM
Location Los Angeles River Ranger District / Angeles National Forest
Incident Commander K. Giao
Current Situation
Total Personnel 34
Size 160,577 acres
Percent Contained 100%


GIS provides the Geographic advantage to study the Station Fare on LA from August/September. Geographic information system(GIS) technology provides tools and data to depict and analyze the disaster. The data required are Elevation, Water sources, Weather conditions, locations of natural resources, and Fire station locations and infrastructure and population.
In this laboratory projected shapefiles were downloaded from LA county enterprise GIS website and software ArcGIS was used.

The weather conditions on August/September 2009 worried all of us in the state of California. The temperature in Southern California was abnormally hot with very little humidity present in the atmosphere and the hot local winds were very intense. The map I decided to create is about the Station Fire in the LA nation park and recreational areas. It can be seen the area of the fire and compare it to the total artea of the county. Using several layers one can get better sense of the fire scale.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Los Angeles County. "GIS Data.. at http://gis.lacounty.gov/eGIS/?page_id=117.
U.S. Forest Service. http://www.inciweb.org/incident/article/9512/ .

2. The Massive Californian Wildfires Encircling Los Angeles , at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1210417/.


3. Council for Geoscience. "Landslides and Slope Instability." Council for Geoscience. 14 March 2009. The Collective Advisory (TCA). 22 November 2009. .

4. USGS. "Emergency Assessment of Postfire Debris-Flow Hazards for the 2009 Station Fire, .

5. USGS. "2009 Station Fire, Dunsmore Canyon, Glendale California." USGS - Science for changing the world. 13 October 2009. U.S. Department of the Interior. 11 November 2009. .

GEOGRAPHY 7 LABORATORY 6

AREA OF INTEREST:


MALIBU

Longitude -76.1 decimal degrees
Latitude 36.85 decimal degrees

The spatial reference is GCS North American 1983,
UTM Zone 10.


My choice was an area of Malibu, California, because the spot has a beautiful Beaches, Parks & Attractions the same time all over the year. The Story of Malibu is presented by the Malibu Lagoon Museum and dedicated to preserving Malibu's unique history. This story tells the saga of scenic and historic Malibu with its 23 miles of beautiful coastline, rugged mountains, wooded canyons, and sheltered coves. Here you will find an exciting portion of California history from the time of Malibu's first residents, the Chumash Indians, to the present day. (Malibu, Lagoon Museum).

GEOGRAPHY 7 LABORATORY 5

This Laboratory exercise introduced to projecting GIS data to ArcGIS. Map projection deals with spatial data defined on the curved surface of the earth and transforms it to the two dimensional surface of a map by mathematical algorithm . This exercise has been completed using ArcGIS 9.2. All data needed for this exercise were provided by Geography 7 Laboratory database.

Conformal projection is known as a Projection which preserves the original shape of the area of interest but not the area or distance. For instance, when we use Mercator Map as a world map it does hold distortion when you look at the map.

The area of the world is presented as Equal-Area projection, but it consist distortions. For example meridian are equally spaced , but the parallels are not. It is particular mapping from a sphere to a disk. It finds application for statistical analysis and in various scientific disciplines, for plotting the orientations of lines in three-dimensional space.

From equidistant maps projections we can measure a true distances from center of the projection. Equidistant map do have flaws too and can be misleading.
Equidistant maps preserve the distances between certain points, but scale is not maintained correctly by any projection throughout an entire map.” Most Equidistant projections have one or more lines in which the length of the line on a map is the same length (at map scale) as the same line on the globe, regardless of whether it is a great or small circle, or straight or curved. Such distances are said to be true.”( ArcGIS, Help file)
Distance between Washington DC and Kabul measured in this laboratory are about 4836. 6 miles

GEOG7 LAB 4

ArcGIS is a software product , created my ESRI. With ArcGIS Desktop users are able to analyzes, models, visualizes, and shares geography spots. Using included tools you can build your own applications. ArcGIS Desktop gives you an overview of the program as well as it shows you how to access the basic functions of the software. A step by step tutorial introduce the readers with the basic framework of ArcGIS Desktop—including the structure of each, the functions each performs, and how they can be used together. The main application in ArcGIS is ArcMap, which is used for both mapping and editing task.


I use this program to create my first map. To become familiar with the program it took about 15 hours, but it was helpful. Using a given tutorial I did not meet seriously troubles with it. To became more skilled I need to work on it more than two weeks.


Even the program is user friendly written, one shod be detail oriented. The man disadvantage is the price of the program, but using lab facilities it is acceptable for everyu UCLA student. It is a program which take a time and you should be very patient.


ArcGIS has a big potential collecting a ton of information. “Regardless of whether you are using ArcGIS in a desktop, mobile, or server environment, the new enhancements will improve how geographic information is leveraged throughout your enterprise. ArcGIS 10 is expected to be available in June 2010., (http://www.esri.com)