LA Fire Spread

Week 7 - Mt. Vernon Maps

Mt. Vernon is in Northern California, about 30 miles north of Sacramento. It is a small mountain in the middle of the valley in Sutter County. The geographic coordinate system reveals that that cell size (x,y) is (27.54633136, 27.54633136. The extent is:

Extent
Top - 4351369.27031
Bottom - 4332472.487
Left - 593142.05708
Right- 612479.581698

Week 6 - Projections

ArcGIS tutorial

ArcGIS is a very complex piece of software with several advantages as well as disadvantages. The tutorial was helpful in walking through a cursory step by step process of a relatively involved map. The five exercises were fairly easy to walk through with only a few hiccups along the way. The overall challenge was highly educational in terms of understanding how the different layers of a map work and how to use the various tools.

Some advantages of using ArcGIS are being able to create very thorough maps which convey a lot of information to the reader. Little details within the program are geared towards making the actual reading of the map as user friendly as possible. For instance the legend, scale bar and compass rose are all nice touches. The feature making it easy to align and resize makes the map neat. Renaming the items in the table of contents immediately reflects on the legend. The ability to make graphs helps explain the significance of the map in concise way.

The disadvantages of ArcGIS are that the actual program is not user friendly at all. The entire feel of the program is old and outdated. While it has the capability of processing enormous amounts of information, the program is fickle and convoluted. ArcGIS needs a 2010 makeover. A facelift if you will, this isn’t 1998.

The biggest difficulty that I ran into was file management. ArcGIS becomes very confused when files are saved in different places and it creates a hole of unlinked information in your project. After trial and error I was finally able to consolidate all of my files into a thumb drive. The slightest slip up in saving location can render all of your work unusable.

This exercise was a really great first introduction into the world of ArcGIS. Practice makes perfect or several all nighters in a row, whichever comes first.