Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Assignment 2

In this assignment, Wine flavors are directly influenced by factors related to where the grapevines grow, especially soil, climate, elevation, slope, and slope aspect.  We wanted to find the suitable sites for a winery and vineyard areas.
We first started with the base map.
Then I put the elevation layer of the site of interest on to the base map.
I used the Aspect tool, to show where the sunlight is coming from.  The South and the Southwest locations that have an aspect between 157.5 and 247.5 degrees are optimal for maximum sun exposure.
This is the slope. The green and yellow areas of the slope raster represent gentle terrain, while the orange and red areas represent steeper areas.

The cells in orange are sloser to freeways and are considered more suitable for a vineyard than areas in red and blue, which are farther away.  This was considered because winery customers would be close to be able to find it.

In this one, I had to manually recalculate the aspect from the previous one to get them into a ranking scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being least suitable and 5 being the most suitable. 
This time I reclassified the distance to the freeways.
And here too, I reclassified the slope.

This is what I came up with.  Since I reclassified  the slope, aspect, and distance to freeways I could  now use the weighted overlay tool.  I then had to assign percentages of influence of relative importance that would all add up to 100. The aspect was 50%, slope was 30%, and distance to freeways was 20%.


The most suitable vineyard are in green.




First Class Assignment

I used ArcGIS 10 to do these along with the Spatial Analysis tools.
First, I calculated the Slope for the surface of Wayne County, MI
Then, I calculated the profile curvature of Wayne County
The hillside also was calculated.

The Aspect tool was used to show the direction of the sunlight that hit the surface in this map
And lastly, I converted the DEM into a 3D TIN and this was the result. Since this is Wayne County, the surface is relatively flat, so not much is shown; at least in 3D.