Monday, May 2, 2011

Geog 7 Lab 4

This is the result for exercise 1.  The blue part of the map shows the area of the airport, and the lines within it show the runway.  The shape surrounding it represents the raise that the noise from the airport can travel, and the map also includes surrounding roads.  In this first exercise, it is important to determine which schools, represented by the little dots throughout the map, are within the airport's noise contour.  This helps determine where to avoid building schools in the future.  From the map, it appears that only a couple of schools are within the noise contour, including Northwestern Prep, which was required to be labeled for this particular exercise.  ArcGIS technology allows us to know where to build schools, as well as providing information for other practical uses.

This map in the second exercise shows the original map from exercise 1, in addition to a bar graph and a map of the distribution of land use within the noise contour.  Based on these images, it appears that there is lots of agricultural and residential development within this noise contour.  This implies that there are lots of families that could potentially be bothered by this noise contour extending out from the airport.  Surprisingly this exercise does not show a huge amount of commercial development around the airport area.  With the air traffic noise in that area, it is possible that homes are cheaper within the surrounding area.  With cheaper homes comes more buyers, which leads to more residential development.


 This map in exercise 3, specifically the map added at the bottom, displays the population density in this particular city presented in this tutorial.  Based on the map, it appears that the population is by far the densest in the center of the city, where the major roads intersect.  This major population center is about 15-20 miles from the airport.  This is typical of many major cities, since airport areas generally are not the spots of major populations.  The dark green parts of the map probably represents the downtown of this particular city.  Outside of this huge population concentration, the population is relatively light throughout the rest of the city, where not many major roads intersect as they do in the downtown area.






This map in exercise 4 is not much different from the previous exercise.  In particular, road names are added to the original map at the top.  In addition, this exercise showed how to add a new feature to a data range, which in this case meant creating a new street, called Airport Road.  The ability of developers to easily create new features on an ArcGIS map makes it possible to design and plan city centers much easier than ever before.  Developers can decide how to use the land and where to develop based on the technology available her in ArcGIS.











This final exercise, exercise 5, sums up the entire airport expansion plan into one complete layout view.  First off, exercise 5 introduced a new map, a very general map showing in the red box in the top left corner the airport expansion area.  This map does not need any features, but rather is very direct and shows clearly the general area where the planned airport expansion is set to occur.  This type of layout view with multiple maps is an exceptional tool at the disposal of developers everywhere because it simultaneously shows roads, schools, land use charts, land use graphs, population density and a general view of the proposed airport expansion all in one simple layout view.

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