Ars Geophysica

My discourse below is a reflection upon what I learned in the final project of the course, having co-written the report “Assessment of the Potential Geothermal Resource of British Columbia*”: It is a well known fact that despite the fact that Canada possesses plentiful geothermal resources (see the report “Geothermal Resource Potential of Canada” (2012) for validation of this fact), there currently exist precisely zero sites of geothermal electricity production. With geothermal power being one of the few renewable energy sources capable of providing consistent baseload power, and without occasionally…read more

Skills Acquired: Gained familiarity with BC Government TRIM data (Terrestrial Resource Information Management) Employed tools including clipping, reclassification, merging, buffering, and spatial joining Made selections by attributes in order to statistically quantify areal percentages of ecosystem affected Exercised technical writing skills for the purpose of a realistic environmental consultancy scenario   Ethics and Environmental Projects I personally believe, my perspective being aligned with that which I espoused in the memo below, that the Garibaldi at Squamish Project is unfeasible, given that the project as presently proposed has been quantitatively shown…read more

Skills Acquired: Employed buffer proximity analysis, reclassification, conversion between raster and vector data types, polygon overlay via intersection, and clipping Calculated land use statistics from layer attribute tables Produced a map displaying regions of the City of Vancouver at potential risk of inundation from a tsunami Proportion of Total Area of The City of Vancouver prone to tsunamis For each of the layers Vancouvermask (total) and Vancouver_danger (proportion at risk), I opened the attribute table, selected statistics, and summed the areas – calculate the area ratio Area(Vancouvermask) = 131033339.95 m^2…read more

Skills Acquired: Gained familiarity with geographic properties of GIS data (coordinate systems, datums, etc.) Aligned spatial data via proper spatial referencing Evaluated inherent potential pitfalls in interpretation owing from raster resolution and the mixed pixel problem (MPP) Analyzed and manipulated remote sensing images   Fixing Misaligned and improperly referenced spatial data When there are thousands of map projections out there preserving every combination of area, shape, angle, distance, and direction you can conceive of, it’s little wonder that spatial data can end up hopelessly mangled – misaligned, out of place,…read more