Lab 5 - Spatial Analysis

1. Iowa contains 99 counties.
2. As of 2001, the county with the largest number of people in Georgia is Fulton.
3. Washington has 39 cities that have a population greater than 15,000 people.
4. There are 3,851.14 miles of interstate that are crossed by the outline of Los Angeles County.
5. There are 1,367,445.9 acres of urban area that lie within the boundaries of Los Angeles County.

6. 522 zip codes that have their centroid in Los Angeles County.
7.
8.There are 5 Native American Indian Reservations that lie within 75 miles of Thurso. Here are their names and approximate mileage from Thurso:
Doncaster Indian Reserve- 17 mi
Kitigan Zibi Indian Reserve- 15 mi
Kahnawake Indian Reserve- 14 mi
Kanesatake Indian Reserve- 16 mi
Akwesane Indian Reserve- 15 mi

Mt. St. Helen 2D Image

Mt. St. Helens

Percentage of Some Other Race Population in Counties, 2000

In my map “Percentage of Some Other Race Population in Counties, 2000”, it displays counties throughout the U.S. and where Some Other Race populations were distributed in the year 2000. By looking at the map, it seems clear that this “Some Other Race” is referring to Hispanics. With the exception of the upper Northwest part of the U.S., almost all of this race was concentrated by or near the border to Mexico, which would make one assume that Hispanics are the actual race being identified in this map. I am very surprised how there were very few Hispanics to the East of Texas. I assumed that a decent amount of Hispanics would have made their way to the East Coast as of 2000. Living in Southern California all my life, I reside among a high percentage of Hispanics, so I naively assumed that this race was more widely distributed throughout the United States. Another part of the map that caught my eye are the states of Alaska and Hawaii (located in the boxes of the bottom). They had practically zero Hispanics living in these states.

Percentage of Asian Population in Counties, 2000

In my map “Percentage of Asian Population in Counties, 2000”, it displays counties throughout the U.S. and where their Asian populations were distributed in the year 2000. With the exception of California and New York, there are not many parts of the mainland U.S. where there are high concentrations of Asians. This is most likely because the first entrances Asians had into the United States were located at Ellis and Angel Islands, located by San Francisco and New York. When compared to Blacks, Asians were more widely distributed throughout almost all parts of the U.S., not only concentrated in sections of the country. It also seems like there were more Blacks than Asians in the U.S. in 2000. The most interesting part of the map is seeing how dark Hawaii is, which means it possess a high and concentrated Asian population.

Percentage of Black Population in Counties, 2000

In my map “Percentage of Black Population in Counties, 2000”, it displays counties throughout the U.S. and where their black populations were distributed in the year 2000. It is clear by looking at the map where Blacks were residing 10 years ago. Most of them lived in the Southeast part of the U.S as well as along the East Coast up until the New England Area. This is not surprising news to me because I have been aware that states in this section of the U.S., especially Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, are highly populated with Blacks. And usually, where a certain demogarphic live, others will seek these areas out and live there as well, creating dense concentration of this race at various locations. This goes along with the thought that certain groups of people prefer to live by each other, and in this case, it is the black population. One aspect of the map that I found interesting was the lack of Blacks living in California. Living in Los Angeles for the last 4 years, I would have assumed the Black population was much higher than it says on the map. This could be because the map data was from the year 2000.

ArcMap Tutorial

In my opinion, ArcMap is the first legitimate GIS system I have operated on in this class. I know our Mapquest project is technically considered GIS, however it seems rather elementary compared to a sophisticated program like ArcMap. ArcMap offers so many options and is an extremely complex program. It takes a long time to truly understand the program and utilize it to its capability, but once this is done ArcMap can do wonders.
The biggest problem I had with ArcMap is remembering the steps. The tutorial took me through same steps more than once, yet by the second time I still did not have full understanding of it. Not until the last few pages of the tutorial did I somewhat memorize how to insert a legend and bar scale. If I had trouble with simple tasks like that then GIS is a lot more difficult than I had previously imagined.
Obviously, ArcMap is an amazing GIS program. The options you have to describe a simple map with are incredible. After completing the tutorial I was amazed on what kind of work I had just done. To show the noise barrier, ranges, scales, and other aspects of the map that I did was truly interesting. I never thought that a GIS system like this had the capability to show some of the stuff the ArcMap showed me.
I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for someone to master a program like ArcMap. I spent a good three hours (which seemed like 10) doing the tutorial and I have just stepped into the shallow waters of this GIS system. To fully comprehend the program must takes years. However, once I started to get the hang of things and was adding text boxes and charts to my project it was truly satisfying. Hopefully before this class is over I will have the ability to work with GIS programs like this and apply it to everyday life.

Conformal Projections

Although these two map projections are both Conformal projections, they are different. The Gall Stereographic and the Mercator projections both display the Earth, however, their scales are off. The first noticeable difference that alerts the viewer is the size of the grids. The Gall map's parcels are much more consistent that the Mercator's parcels. Both map's parcels are smaller near the equator and larger at the poles, but the Mercator projection's change in sizes is much more drastic, resulting in Antartica looking larger than all the other conitnents combined, which is obviously false. These changes in parcel sizes make the measured distances from Washington, D.C. and Kabul, Afghanistan different.The Mercator and Gall maps are not intended to display measurements accurately. Instead, they are desinged to display shapes correctly. Because of this, distances displayed on the map are not precise beacuse of the distortions on the map.

Equal Area Projections

When looking at the Equal Area Projections, we notice that the Sinusoidal and Cylindraical Equal Area maps have different distances from Washington, D.C. and Kabul by a difference of about 3,000 miles! This difference occurs because equal area projections are not desinged to measure distance accurately. As one may tell by the name, Equal Area Projections preserve area on a map, not so much distance. This is apparent by the large difference between my two maps.

Equidistant Projections

The Equidistant projections above are desingned to preserve distance accurately. Therefore, the maps should have similar distances from Washington, D.C. to Kabul. However, there is a 3,000 mile difference. The Equidistant Conic map is an example of a solid Equidistant projection, but the Plate Carree map does not exactly do what the map is intended for. Because the parcels are all the same size, distances that are not directly near the equator are slightly off. This is why the Plate Carree's distance from Washington to Kabul varies from the Equidistant Conics distance.