Projections Part 2, The Storage and Contamination Monitoring Project

Happy Valentines day wonderful page viewers.
What better way to herald Valentines day with a post about contaminated lubricants. More specifically, this post will give highlight to the second week of Projections work in Intro to GIS by discussing the Escambia County FL Petroleum Storage and Contamination Monitoring project I have created. First lets look at some of the learning objectives that led the way for this project. 

• Explore and download aerials, topographic quadrangles, shapefiles and tabular xy data from two different online data sources for Florida
• Define a spatial reference for an unknown data set
• Reproject GIS data to a common coordinate system and projection (understanding the difference between defining and projecting the coordinate system)
• Identify UTM and state plane zones for a specific area 
• Decipher Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) code
• Create/Convert x,y data using Microsoft Excel and import to ArcGIS
• Locate important accuracy information regarding GIS/GPS data
• Relate coordinate values to the appropriate earth hemisphere and double that check calculations make geographical sense
• Generate a map displaying aerials, topographic quads, shapefiles and tabular xy data

 This project focused on being a guided trial run for the impending midterm. As such the key tasks were to gather imagery (Quarter Quads) from reputable sources, and then convert and project provided tabular data (excel spreadsheet) for ArcMAP use, and build a map (exclusively in ArcMAP) incorporating these and other base information while ensuring all of the various data and input layers were projected in a common coordinate system. My version of the project is seen below.

One of the particulars of the assignment was to incorporate two adjacent 7.5 minute quarter quad pictures. For my project I chose two North - South oriented quads, those for Pace and Pensacola proper, which give you an entire overview of eastern Pensacola as it rests on the Pensacola and Escambia Bay's. As such this very data populated area is the result. This provides a good overview for you to look at to see where major clusters of certain types of monitoring sites are. We could very easily make the scale larger and focus in on any central area to further explore this data, it also lends you to believe the areas not pictured to the west would be as populated whereas the eastern residential shore has less sites. Please enjoy this overview map. Thank you.