After having completed the first 2 classes in the University of West Florida GIS Certification, students have now moved on to GIS 4048 Applications in GIS (and GIS4990 GIS Programming - but there is nothing to post for that class).
The following maps were part of the first GIS assignment for the class, Earthquakes, part of a three week Natural Hazards unit demonstrating the applicability of GIS for use in Natural Hazard identification, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. The maps were created using ArcGIS 9.3 software and come from the Environmental Sciences Research Institute (ESRI) Virtual Campus course - Spatial Analysis of Geohazards Using ArcGIS 9.
I'm just posting the maps and not providing details on their creation at this time due to deadlines for the course. These posts were not required for class, but the maps took some time and look pretty good, so I wanted to put them up here.
The first map shows vulnerable railroads within the shake zone of an fours earthquakes that occurred near New Madrid, Missouri in 1811-1812. The railroad and road data is from today and the map demonstrates how looking at historical earthquake information provides insight into the effect a similar earthquake would have today in an area that at the time was very sparsely populated but is now close to some major urban area. The rairoads in the map that are identified all fall within Modified Mercalli Scale (MMI) Zone X wherein the intensity of shaking is such that rails could be bent.
The second map is a comparison of Building Damage Density, a measure taken by using GIS to count all the damaged or destroyed buildings located in an area around the epicenter of the 1994 Northridge California earthquake, to Peak Ground Velocity (PGV)measurments of the surrounding land. PGV was calculated using a GIS spatial anlysis techning called splining which is based on the location and attribute data of all the earthquake measuring stations located in the area.
The final two maps show distribution and other data related to aftershocks from the Northridge earthquake.
