final project

In this final project for Geo 7, we use what we have learned in ArcGIS to analyze the station fire in Los Angeles County during 2009 summer. According to the station fire update, during the summer in 2009, the station fire started around the Angeles Crest Ranger Station on July 7, 2009 and ended October 27, 2009 finally. As we can see, this station fire lasted for a surprisingly long period, destroying large area in California. Based on CNN, "Bone-dry conditions in an area that has not seen a major fire in more than 60 years pushed a Southern California wildfire from 45,000 acres to more than 100,000 acres...has forced thousands of evacuations and threatened thousands of structures ". 

In this lab, we did a reference map first, as seen in the first picture. From the data on the Los Angeles County Enterprise GIS website, we download the all station fire perimeter during 2009, Summer. We can see there are more than twenty perimeters in the dataset. In this picture, I choose one fire on August 28th, one on August 29th and one on September 1st. Besides, I also download the elevation from the website for Los Angeles county in order to view the place of station fire.

From the picture,  we can see the station fire is concentrated in almost one area, which is around the mountains in the north east of Los Angeles county. The station fire covers pretty larger areas. The one on September 2nd covers larger area compared to the other two areas. Besides, we can see the place of station fire is around 2000 feet. Therefore, we can get that the fire take place on the mountain where there is few people and more trees. From picture three from Boston.com website, we can the fire burning heavily.

Furthermore, we did a thematic map in this lab, as seen the second picture. This map is about the relationship of water body and station fire in Los Angeles County. In this map, we can see the fire perimeters in the center in the yellowish color. Besides, the blueish color represent the water body. The dark blue point represent the wells and reservoirs. The lighter blue regions with dots in it represent the playas. The lighter blue lines represent the river lines. 

From this map, we can get the idea that there is a pretty clear relationship in the water body and station fire. As in the map, the regions where the fire took places is far away from the playas, wells and reservoirs. Although there are some river lines across or around the fire station region, the water amount of the river line is too little to put out the fire. While the playas, wells, reservoirs contains huge amount of water, providing the moisture to their areas and preventing the big fire station happening in those areas. From the picture four, we can see during the station fire, the helicopters carry the water, may be from the wells, reservoirs near it to put out the fire.

During this final project, I find out I am getting more and more flexible and confident using ArcGIS. By learning this software for around 5 weeks, I get to know about the power of ArcGIS. This software provide people a clear view and information about what is happening. Like in this project, from the maps I did in ArcMap, we can easily see the perimeters of station fire, the reason why it happens and the relationship between the fire and other factors. I hope in the future, I can get the opportunity to leaning more about the ArcGIS.

Reference

 Station Fire Update. LaCañadaFlintridge.com, 2009, September 10.http://www.lacanadaflintridge.com/docfiles/city/emrg_na_mis_090910_091045.pdf.

All Station Fire Perimeters. Los Angeles County Enterprise GIS. 2009, September. http://egis3.lacounty.gov/eGIS/2009/09/02/all-station-fire-perimiters-as-of-september-2-0702-complete-ste/

The Big Picture. Boston.com. 2009, September 2. http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/wildfires_in_southern_californ.html

Angry fire roars across 100000 California acres. CNN. 2009, August 31. http://articles.cnn.com/2009-08-31/us/california.wildfires_1_mike-dietrich-firefighters-safety-incident-commander?_s=PM:US

The National Map Seamless Server. Seamless Data Warehouse. http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htm