Lab 8- Station Fire

The Station Fire began on the afternoon of August 26, 2009, in the Angeles National Forest near La Canada, CA (specific coordinates are 34.251, -118.195). The fire, which started less than a mile from Angeles Crest Highway due to arson, is the 10th largest in California since 1933, burning a total of 160,577 acres (Incident Information System). The terrain of the area is considered "steep and extremely rugged" with thick conifer trees that retain heat, numerous standing dead trees, and a considerable layer of debris and leaf litter that allowed the fire to burn more easily, while also making it harder to extinguish. The fire was deemed fully contained, meaning there were no longer flames or heat present in the burn area, on October 16, 2009, 2 months from its inception.

Vegetation went up in flames and the ground lay torched and blackened as 250 squares miles of the San Gabriel Mountains succumbed to the fire. And while Angeles National Forest has only temporary residents in its ranger stations and campgrounds, many of which were destroyed as the fire progressed, dozens of adjacent communities were expecting the worst. The origin of the Station Fire was calculated to be one mile from the ranger station at La Canada Flintridge. As the fire grew, consuming trees and leaf litter left from years of dormancy, its perimeter spread quickly northward, eventually extending to the northern edge of the forest, as well as making its way east and westward. One of the biggest fuels for the fire was the dry Santa Ana Winds that sweep downward toward the sea off the San Gabriel Mountains. Because heat rises, and since the location of greatest fuel (oxygen) can be found at higher elevations, forest fires are prone to moving uphill, which the Station Fire did as it moved from its point of origin to communities on the northern border like Acton and Mount Wilson.

Eight major cities, La Canada, Sunland, Tujunga, Altadena, Pasadena, Glendale, Acton, Sierra Madre, as well as Mt. Wilson and many smaller towns were in direct danger of the fire's reach (Lin). The Los Angeles Fire Department called for mandatory evacuations of the nearest cities, and voluntary evacuations for those areas estimated to be in the range of flames according to daily shifts in weather. Because of the swiftness of the fire's movement, and the initially unfavorable weather conditions for firefighter teams, not only were commercial properties in danger, but residential neighborhoods and several communication towers atop Mt. Wilson were at risk and a major priority of fire prevention teams once they were able to effectively take action. Mount Wilson, which can be seen from the Angeles Crest Highway, is the site of Mount Wilson Observatory, the astronomical hub of Southern California. Its land is also home to the Electronics Reservation which has radio and television antennae for the Metromedia Company, and microwave relay facilities for AT&T and other phone and internet entitities. If Mt. Wilson were overtaken by the flames, communication would, in essence, be cut off for most of Los Angeles County and surrounding areas.

Further threats came from the proximity of the fire to not only local roads, but major highways. Highways 210, 405, 5 and especially 2, which the fire crossed to get into the Arroyo Seco area, and smaller suburban roadways were all perilously close to the inferno, creating hazards for residents trying to get out of their homes and firefighters trying to reach the blaze (Lin, Simmons, Zavis). The uncertainty of the flames, which seemed to be jumping containment boundaries without hesitation, and the swirling clouds of ash and smoke provided locals with visual impairment and potential health complications, especially the elderly and small children. An air quality smoke advisory was placed on areas directly bordering the fire line for nearly a month since it started in late August. Plus, the haze amassed by the heavy smoke made maneuvering by ground vehicles and aircraft (in place to dump gallons of water and fire retardant onto the fire) almost impossible. Evacuation centers set up by the Red Cross in school gymnasiums and local hotels saw dozens of evacuees from various regions pouring in each night with their families, pets, and armfuls of belongings they deemed most worth saving. With the overwhelming size of the fire, the numerous obstacles created by nearby structures and unforgiving terrain, and limited resources, in terms of manpower and equipment, at hand to battle the blaze, it took weeks to quell the flames and significant damage had been done.

The cost for all the destruction is estimated at over $78 million. In all, 166 structures were damaged, including 82 residences and 2 communications sites. Hundreds of acres are left charred and barren, and have posed a serious threat from mudslides during the winter and early spring rainy season, especially on roadways like Highway 2 and Angeles Crest Highway which were directly affected by the flames and lie within parts of Angeles National Forest. Debris and loosened earth are easily propelled downslope under moderate to heavy rains, so the US Forestry Service has been closely monitoring areas of drastic elevation for a possible mud or landslide. Yet in all the physical wreckage, only 11 injuries (mostly due to byproducts of the actual fire) have been reported, and only 2 deaths (2 firemen whose vehicle tumbled over the edge of a cliff) occurred (KTLA). Hot spots may still be quietly burning, so every few weeks following "containment" helicopters have been sent to dump water on areas in the burn zone to keep any resurrgence from occurring. The Los Angeles Fire Department has also created a new program ,"Ready! Set! Go!," which performs brush clearance inspections of wildland residential areas, and that is aimed at helping teach residents how to protect themselves and their properties in the event of a fire (Freeman). But for the most part, all that's left of the Station Fire is scorched earth and a period of rebuilding.





Bibliography

"Evacuation Info, Road and School Closures." KTLA News. 10 Sept. 2009 http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-station-fire-evacuations,0,7123246.story?page=1.

Freeman, P. Michael. "Ready! Set! Go!." County of Los Angeles Fire Department. 2009 http://www.fire.lacounty.gov/SafetyPreparedness/ReadySetGo/home.asp.

Lin II, Rong-Gong. "Los Angeles Fire Map." Los Angeles Times. 11 Sept. 2009 http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-la-fire-map-html,0,7464337.htmlstory.

Lin II, Rong-Gong; Simmons, Ann; Zavis, Alexandra."La Canada Fire Spreads Toward Alta Dena; Big Tujunga Canyon Road Closed." Los Angeles Times. 28 Aug. 2009 http://www.latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/08/la-canada-fires-spread-toward-altadena-big-tujunga-canyon-road-closed.html.

"Station Fire." Incident Information System. 10 Nov. 2009 http://www.inciweb.org/incident/1856/.

Lab 7- Digital Elevation Model

The Digital Elevation Models, as well as the 3D image above, represent an area in Southwestern California near the Los Angeles region. Because the geographic information is projected using latitude 0 and longitude -117, with the North American Datum of 1983, UTM Zone 11, the geographic coordinate system used to represent the location is GCS North American 1983. At 34.414 degrees North and -118.053 degrees West (also, -34.229 degrees South and 117.856 degrees East) the topography is variable in elevation, indicative of a mountainous terrain with changing slopes and slope aspects. Slope, which is the derivative of the Digital Elevation Model, is a measurement of the percent rise or fall of an elevation against the land's horizontal distance. A majority of the slope faces are only slightly steep, with vertical measurements tending between either 0 and 16 degrees or 45 and 67 degrees, the highest of which tend towards the middle with more gentle slopes toward the periphery of the region. The aspect, however, is the horizontal direction in which the slope faces, measured in degrees clockwise from the North. The aspects of the various mountainous formations ranged most from 112.5-247.5 degrees, meaning they primarily face to the South (with Southwestern and Southeastern variations. There are some steeper slopes with sides also angled toward the Northwest starting at 292.5 degrees, but the primary view of the observer is looking at the range from a southern vantage point.

Lab 6- Map Projections

A map projection is a method of representing the Earth's 3D surface on a flat surface. They show various perspectives of the Earth and its features in order to better help people visualize the world in its entirety or smaller, distinct regions and landforms. Maps are constructed for specific purposes, but each projection chosen to preserve aspects of the Earth to serve that purpose simultaneously compromise other metric properties in order to achieve that goal. If a conformal map, for example, preserves the right angles of intersection between lines of longitude and latitude giving a more accurate direction or bearing, it cannot also maintain accurate shapes or areas of countries, and vice versa. One of the most popularly used projections is the WGS 1984; it uses spheroidal coordinates from the Geographic Coordinate System anchored at Earth's center, and provides the most concise global datum for defining surface locations. Using this map as the foundation in the lab, it gives the most true distance from Washington D.C., USA to Kabul, Afghanistan as 7012.543 miles.

Conformal maps, as previously mentioned, keep 90 degree angles at intersections, thereby creating a precise grid from which accurate directions and bearings can be measured. Two such maps are the Mercator and Gall Stereographic. On both maps, angles are preserved, but moving away from the mid-latitudes towards the poles, country shapes are distorted, stretched vertically, and the North and South Poles cannot even be shown. The Mercator, due to its gridded structure, can correctly demarcate local or regional areas and is used to generate bearing while in the air or at sea. It, however, entirely overestimates the measured distance between D.C. and Kabul by almost 3100 miles. The Gall Stereographic, having slightly less distrortion upon moving north or south from a varied false easting and northing, comes very close to the true distance, with a measurement of 7153.787 miles, which is impressive since its typical function is to display all countries on a single map, which leads to shape distortion and possible distance incongruence.

If, like most of the general public, someone just wants a planar map to show them countries or regions, an equal area map is a better fit. The Bonne Map is an equal area projection commonly used to portray single continents or smaller regions. A true scale remains along the central meridian and all parallels, which maintains an accurate sizing, but distortion does increase as objects move away from the Equator. Although the size of both the United States and Afghanistan are accurate in proportion to each other, and as they would be in 3 dimensional reality, Bonne only registers the distance between the 2 cities as 6738.138 miles. The Sinusoidal Equal Area Projection recorded a distance of 8107.158 miles. It, like the Bonne, represent single land masses well, but the Sinusoidal is most accurate in regions near the Equator. It has straight latitude lines and longitude lines curved based on sine functions, which distorts angles and distance as the parallels are spaced farther apart closer to the midlatitudes.

The last major "property-preserving" projection category is the equal distance map. The Conic variation has all circular meridians spaced evenly along meridians, making distance spacing equal. The poles are shown as arcs since shape and area distortion increase moving farther from the standard parallel. While it is best used to map midlatitude countries with a large east-west extent, it has provided the closest measurement to the WGS84 number with 6964.052 miles, roughly 18 miles variation. The second equal distance projection is Cylindrical. This projection uses simple calculation to form a grid of rectangles of equal size, shape and area. Distortion does increase as one moves away from the standard parallel, but there is less at the poles. Because of the grid, distance remains equal, though slightly skewed. But it is still only most accurate for local and city maps, indicated by 5023.934 mile city to city measurement.

All in all, choosing a map projection should rely on the desired intent of the map. Preserve the properties most integral to the topic of importance for the map's audience. In this experiment, the Conic Equal Distance projection proved to most accurately coincide with the measurements taken on the WGS 1984 datum map. While it seems that is an obvious choice because its function is to maintain correct distances, the Gall Stereographic, which preserves angles, came in a close second. Accuracy can be based not only on the metric properties preserved by the map overall, but by the location of points of interest. If the measurements had been of a region within the lines of the Tropics, a conformal projection may have been more reliable. But each projection is an estimation regardless, since different distortions are found in different areas throughout the map because a 2D projection can never measure up to the 3D reality.

Lab 4: ArcGIS

Geographic Information Systems, also known as GIS, allow its users to create products that are a comprehensive version of image visualization and spatial analysis. It creates maps that have the ability to display a range of geographically referenced information, from land use features to population densities or demographics. With GIS tools, viewers can view and interpret data in novel ways, such that relationships, patterns and trends can be revealed and examined.

GIS has the potential to divide the globe into minutely organized and categorized regions, which different people or companies can then further splice up based on their topics of interest. For instance, a new children's clothing company would look at a local map that displays population numbers and household income information, and place their store in a location with a high concentration of young, wealthy families. These extensive resources of archival datasets fuse the field of spatial analysis with commerical and consumer databases. Or in the instance of environmental justice, pollution sources can be plotted in an area to see if high concentrations of polluting firms are being placed in low income neighborhoods, or if they're in locations that also show high rates of cancer or disease, to help show a correlation between the two. GIS can help answer these types of questions, and is part of the ubiquitous and evolving realm of geospatial technologies and location based devices. It exemplifies while simplifying; converting the chaos that is the real world into uncomplicated geometric objects, and concise layers of differentiated spatial information.

It can, however, be difficult to use if you lack the training, or even the computer software to run the programs. Without access to teaching or a tutorial, the ArcGIS system can be intimidating and even impossible. GIS on the whole is composed of hardware, software, subsystems, and database management systems, the parts of which are used together for purposes like data entry, data storage and data presentation. But each of these subsets of GIS technology come riddled with their own complexities that a novice user may be incapable of deciphering. And on the humanistic side, once the technological aspect is conquered, it can be an unwelcome advancement in computer programming. While firms interested in capitalistic advancement mine consumer data, they are simultaneously exploiting personal information. Most people don't expect to be secretly identified and tracked spatially by companies wishing to squeeze more money out of them. Or in the military sense, troops may use GIS to determine the shortest routes across foreign terrain, or to examine clusters of people or supplies that may indicate a hostile presence. While such knowledge seems beneficial to speed up warfare and aid our troops, the same battle planning capabilities can be used by any enemy military with GIS software. And because it is constantly changing, programmers need to be consistently training to update their GIS knowledge and abilities to match new facets of the software, which makes an already difficult technology even more intimidating.

From personal use with the ArcGIS software, it seems like a simple enough process to not only create a single map, but to manipulate different layers to give the map multiple dimensions of information. The tutorial laid out every aspect of design clearly and concisely, and everything within the software is labeled for simplicity. Though to arrange current data frames, or to create new ones, one needs to have current knowledge of program tools. One mistake in the process of creating a new map, or even a new layer, can create a domino effect that ends up compromising the final product. But the features included in the software help to more than express the topic of ones choosing. GIS is a revolutionary technology that combines locationally referenced data with statistics and attribute information to create a technological and visual tool used to analyze and assess real-world questions.And as it continues to evolve into more user friendly mediums, the scope of its use is sure to broaden and advance the way in which we comprehend aspects of the space that surrounds us.