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Sticking with the fire theme we have been on in class as of late, my map combines cropland in Washington with the potential for wildfires in a similar area. With much of Washington's financial economy depending on its output of produce, keeping these croplands protected from wildfires is essential. Central and Eastern Washington are the particular places of interest in this map. As you can see in the map, the majority of wildfire potential is located east of the Cascades where rain is sparse to begin with.


Overall, experimenting with the online gis website was interesting but it was fairly easy to navigate around the site. Some of the layers that I tried downloading would come up with an error message for the layer saying it was unable to add it. This would cause me to change my approach on my map a few times but it all worked out in the end. My map is a little hard to interpret but when you look at the legend it will help you to distinguish the two layers to show the information.

The area I chose to do was of Stevens Pass located between Skykomish and Leavenworth, Washington. This specific area gave me a few challenges while I was making my DEM. Located in the Cascade Mountains, Stevens Pass is a small winter/summer resort placed right in the middle of the range. I was confused because the whole model looks the same but there is so much elevation change in such a short distance it causes everything to be packed together and no peak is protruding higher than the others. The extent information for my DEM Top: 48.0016666667 Left: -122.0016666667 Right: -120.998333333 Bottom: 46.9983333333 Geographic coordinate system is North American 1983

Overall, this lab exercise was interesting and informing. Looking at how different projections can alter your data. For me, five out the six maps had all of the same measurements even though they were using different projections, so I'm not sure if that is correct or not but it's what I was getting for my projections. The last projection I used was sphere based instead of world based which caused mass distortion near the poles, especially in the north which caused my measurements for that particular projection to be off.

I think projections can be very useful and they have been proven to be, you just have to pay attention to which one you're using and with what data. Of course, when transferring a 3-dimensional object to a two-dimensional surface you will have distortion depending on what projection you are using as you can see in some of the maps I have uploaded.

When it came to the equal area projection I was a little confused because there was only one equal area projection to choose from that incorporated the entire world. The other projection to choose from was a sphere based projection and they both are the exact same image with different measurements.

On every map in my blog, you can see that they all have distortion but it is focused away from the target area I am using, which is measuring the distance across the Atlantic from Washington D.C. to Kabul, Afghanistan. The image is clear on these two continents but you will see amongst the projections the distortion occurs either in the poles or along the sides of the map. A good exercise to get some practice on.

    For my sixth and final map I used the Sphere-Based Equal Area Projection
    Measurements:
    Geodesic: 6,919.84 miles
    Loxodrome: 8,093.35 miles
    Great Elliptic: 6,919.84 miles