Monday, November 3, 2014

Final Project Proposal


For my final project, I chose to do a map on something of interest to me. I decided to look into the mapping of hurricanes. I will map the intensity of hurricanes that made landfall on some part of the United States in 2005. I chose this because outside of class most of my friends and family know me as a weather nerd, so following hurricanes and tracking events such as snowstorms and tornadoes are a true interest of mine.

 

My intended audience is our GGS 310 class and anyone else who looks at my blog. I hope to display the information in a way that someone who is not in the discipline of Geography will understand what the map is about. I figure the best way to show my data and for people to see the intensity difference is to do a proportional symbol map. I hope to find a symbol like the one they use on the weather channel to show the projected path of hurricanes that are a threat to the United States.

 

The base map I will need I would have to get from ArcGIS; showing a map of the states I need. Considering most Atlantic hurricanes start off the Coast of Africa and end up in the Gulf of Mexico, I would need the states from the Gulf as well as the states on the Eastern Seaboard.  Due to water temperature at the peak of hurricane season, some hurricanes take a turn around the Florida coast and head up the East coast.

 

My data set comes from the National Hurricane Center. I decided to go back to 2005 because there is a difference in the number of hurricanes and the intensity of the hurricanes so it will give my map some variation. The size of my data isn’t too large but it is somewhat complex, due to all of the different lines crossing paths of pervious hurricanes. Finding which hurricane path is which is going to take some time but the intensities when they make landfall are easy to figure out.

 

As far as production goes, I ideally would like to have most of the mapping done before we go into Thanksgiving. I don’t want to map all of the data in case you all find some something during final critiques because I don’t want to have to start all over either. I think having lab time in class is going to be helpful as well and should keep me on track for finishing most before going into the holiday instead of having it hanging over me.



I face similar challenges as with my first proportional symbol map. Making sure my legend shows the data set well so that others who aren’t in this class know what each symbol size means. The other challenge I face is in terms of mapping: do I just map where the storm makes landfall or do I map its track as well? If I map the track as well how do I make that different from the map that is on the National hurricane website?

 



 

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