GIS Gazette

 Highlights from the "Digital Coast" industry summary:  I watched an interview featuring NOAA's Mike Schmidt, conducted by a member of the American Planning Association (APA), about the Digital Coast Project. I chose this interview to deepen my understanding of the bathymetric data I use in my daily work. I discovered that Digital Coast is not just a source of raster data; it’s a comprehensive initiative designed to aid coastal areas by providing valuable data to help management specialists enhance the resilience of vulnerable communities. Digital Coast, an impressive initiative by NOAA, offers tools that display real-time and forecast model projections. It integrates various data types, including LIDAR, satellite, economic, and land use/land cover data. Among the available tools are a sea level rise viewer and a land cover atlas. It's particularly useful in my internship, because the Digital Coast data is some of the highest resolution available- it really makes the ...

 GIS Job Search  I started this assignment by simply searching "NOAA GIS jobs." which is how I found this posting for a CSS NOAA contractor job on the esri community board, pasted below.  https://community.esri.com/t5/gis-jobs-documents/marine-gis-analyst-position-at-noaa-contractor/ta-p/913947 Funnily enough, I subscribe to weekly email updates from CSS and did receive this job advert for a Marine GIS Analyst position, several weeks ago. At the time I thought it looked like an awesome position and something I would absolutely apply for.  I found out about CSS via an Indeed job search containing the key words- Marine GIS Technician. Most of the jobs that fit this description are either NOAA jobs or contactors that work for NOAA. The attractive looking roles usually require an advanced degree and/or 5-10 years of relevant experience, which is quite substantial. The entry level salary for most GIS jobs is pretty decent, which bodes well, but building sufficient experie...

 GIS in Business:  I managed to score a job/internship at a seafloor mapping company called StrikeLines Charts. At StrikeLines Charts, GIS is at the core of our operations, focusing on creating high-resolution charts for fishermen using sonar data, primarily from NOAA multibeam surveys. We also conduct custom charter sonar surveys to identify private reefs for customers, providing them with exclusive waypoints. Utilizing ArcGIS and other GIS software, we develop and manage our products from start to finish, processing and analyzing sonar data to create detailed charts and custom surveys. This week, I chose to join the North West Florida GIS User Group (NWFL GIS), which can be found on Facebook . Attending a NWFL GIS User Group meeting in Destin with the UWF staff allowed me to make valuable connections quickly. This experience has the potential to lead to a drone certification at UWF and a personal project using ESRI Experience, a product I learned about at the conference. My ...

 Module 7: Google Earth  This module focused on the future of cartography and different interactive methods to display geographic information. This whole semester has been loaded with a ton of great tips and trick within the ArcGIS software, and this week we got to play with Google Earth. I became a lot more familiar with the rudimentary panning, zooming, and toggling discrepancies unique to Google Earth, which was valuable because each software has it's own tips and tricks. We created a tour of the South Florida area, taking advantage of Google Earth's 3D building feature present throughout metropolitan areas. I was especially impressed with the high quality Lidar data streetscape renderings throughout the Tampa area, the image quality is spectacular. The most important thing I learned in this lab was how to export raster layers from Arc Maps to KMZ Google Earth flies with the export raster layer to KML geoprocessing tool. The map we created had a labeled county layer, a uniq...

 Isarithmic Mapping This week's exercise was hands-on application of isarithmic mapping, using Washington State's annual precipitation data.  Isarithmic mapping is a technique used to illustrate smoothly varying phenomena across a geographical area through the use of isolines- lines that connect points of equal value. The term "isarithmic" is often used interchangeably with "contour mapping," with specific types of isolines named according to the type of data they represent (e.g., isobars for pressure, isotherms for temperature, and contour lines for elevation). This dataset was derived with point data and interpolated using PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model). PRISM is is an analytical tool that leverages point-specific data and a foundational grid, such as a digital elevation model (DEM) or a 30-year climatological average (for instance, from 1981 to 2010), to create grid-based estimates of monthly and annual precipitation a...

 Choropleth Mapping This module was all about practice using proportional symbol maps. We created a map of European wine consumption per capita using graduated symbols on an overlay of population density. The biggest challenge in this exercise was figuring out how to fit all the elements into the layout without generating conflict between different symbologies. The biggest hack I found to mitigate overlapping labels was the conflict resolution feature in labelling properties. As always, the font choice is custom, and the color scheme is selected with user legibility in mind. The projection used was the  Europe Albers Equal Area Conic projection. This cartographic projection is specifically designed to represent Europe with minimal distortion. It belongs to the family of equal-area conic projections, which means that areas on the map are proportionally accurate, though other properties like shapes and angles may be distorted. Hence, being ideal for modeling European wine consum...