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Week 8: Monitoring Fires

Initial Publication Date: June 22, 2010

On This Page

Getting to Know Cartography in My World
Launch My World and Open the Aspen Fire Project
Investigate the Spread of Fire with Database Queries
Investigate the Spread of Fire with Spatial Queries
Create a new Project to Explore Additional Fire Data
Create a Map to Tell a Story of Interest to You
Resources
Movies on this Page
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Getting to Know Cartography in My World

On this page, you'll review database and spatial querying as well as practice symbolizing and classifying data. You'll also find out how to gather statistics on numeric fields that you query.

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Launch My World and Open the Aspen Fire Project

My World Icon
  • Launch My World by double-clicking its icon on your desktop or by clicking its icon in the Dock (Mac) or Launch Bar (Win).
  • Choose File > Open Project, navigate to My World/Data/AspenAE, select the AspenFireMW.m3vz file, and click Open.
  • When the project opens, the base map displays a satellite image of Earth.

    The image is part of the Blue Marble collection at NASA. It is a composite generated from several different types of data. Much of the data comes from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument, a remote sensing device on the Terra satellite. Latitude and longitude lines are visible on top of the image.
1 open aspen




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Investigate the Spread of the Fire with Database Queries

You might wonder . . . How far did the fire spread and how many acres did it consume by the end of Day 1? Day 2? Day 3? Day 4? Use database queries to find out.

  • Scroll down to the bottom of the Layer List. Turn off the Blue Marble Earth image. Then turn on the Shaded Relief and False Color Aerial images plus the Daily Fire Perimeter layer. Zoom in until you can clearly see the perimeter lines.
  1. Scroll down to the bottom of the Layer List.
    TOC contents scrolled down
  2. Turn off the Blue Marble Earth image by clicking the box to the right of its name.
    30 Blue Marble off
  3. Turn on the Countries and US 48 States layer by clicking the boxes to the left of their names.
    31 countries and us states on
  4. Turn on the Shaded Relief and False Color Aerial images plus the Daily Fire Perimeter layer. Look carefully and you will see a small dot in the Southeastern part of Arizona. This dot is all that is visible of the fire images and perimeter layer at this scale. It is necessary to zoom in for a closer look.
    32 shaded relief daily fire on
  5. Make the Daily Fire Perimeter layer active by clicking on its label in the Layer List. Then click the Zoom to Active Layer zoom to active layer button.. This is what the map looks like when zoomed in on the Daily Fire Perimeter layer.
    33 Daily Fire Zoomed in

  • Open the Table of Layer of the Daily Fire Perimeter layer and scroll across the table until you find the ACRES field.
    • The ACRES field indicates the number of acres consumed by the fire, feature by feature. You'll notice that a single day frequently consists of several features displayed as polygons that show the area of the fire each day. We'll ask My World to select these, highlighting them together.
  • Close the Table of layer "Daily Fire Perimeter".

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    Create and execute a query (selection) that shows how far the fire spread on the first day

    How would you write the query statement?

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    Use the Analyze mode to find out how many acres burned by the end of Day 2

    Hint: To find out how many acres burned by the end of the second day, execute a query (selection) that selects the records of areas that burned on both June 17 and June 18, 2003.

    How would you write the query statement?
    1. To find out how many total acres burned, click the Statistics button in the Visualize map window.
      43 selection 618 statistics button
    2. A new window opens. Scroll across the table until you see ACRES as the field to get statistics about. 42 selection 618

    The Statistics includes the Sum which sums the acres burned for each day. The query you built selected all the features from Day 1 and Day 2. So, by the end of the second day, the fire had covered 461.8507 acres.
  • Close the Statistics for Selection window.

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    Create and execute a query to find out how many acres burned by the end of Day 3

    How would you write the query statement? How many acres burned?

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    Create and execute a query to find out how many acres burned by the end of Day 4

    How would you write the query statement? How many acres burned? Movie Icon

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    Investigate the Spread of the Fire with Spatial Queries

    You might wonder . . . How many Parcels were within one mile of the fire on Day 1? Day 2? Day 3? Day 4? Use spatial queries to find out.

    1. The Shaded Relief and False Color Aerial images plus the Daily Fire Perimeter layer should still be on.
      44 layers on
    2. Turn on the Parcel Status layer by clicking the box to the right of its name.
      45 clciking to turn on parcel status
    3. Click the Zoom to Active Layer zoom to active layer button. Individual parcels are now visible on the map.
      47 parcel status on active zoomed in

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    Select by distance: find parcels that are within one mile of the fire on Day 1

    1. In the Analyze window,
    2. Choose Select By Spatial Relationship... By Distance [thumbnail XXXX 25]. Select records from Parcel Status that are Less than 1 mile from records in Fire 617.
    3. Click OK.
      49 analyse window select by distance

  • The map window shows all Parcel Status records that are within one mile of the fire highlighted in magenta.

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    Show the results of the spatial query

    1. Make Parcel Status the active layer and click the Show Table of Selection button.
      50 parcels selcted on map
    2. In the within 1 mile of Day 1 table that opens, you can view the individual records for the layer. Scroll down the table. The selected records are highlighted in yellow. The table in this image has been scrolled partially down the list.
      51 attribute table of selection
  • The number of parcels selected is shown at the top left of the table.
    51 attribute table of selection
  • How many parcels were selected?
  • Close the Selection table.

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    Repeat the steps above to find the parcels that were within one mile of the fire on days two, three, and four

    Movie Icon

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    Create a New Project to Explore Additional Fire Data

    Now that you have explored a specific fire (the Aspen fire), you will broaden your focus to look at fires globally and in the U.S. You will create a new project, add image and vector data and symbolize it as needed to help you visualize patterns in fire data.

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    Where were the fires in February 2010?

    1. Select File > New Project.
      53 file new project
    2. My World will ask if you want save the project that you have open. Click No.The default is Yes...
      54 click no

  • Click the Import New Layer from File add layer from file button. Choose files format "TIFF and GeoTIFF Images". Navigate to the data folder where the image is saved, select the Feb2010_Fire.TIFF, and click Open. The image is located correctly so click OK in the next window that Opens.
  • This is the map with the Feb2010_Fire.TIFF image turned on. The image shows fires active across the globe during February 2010. The data come from the MODIS satellite. It was downloaded from NASA Earth Observations (NEO) site as a GeoTIFF file. It was downloaded at the 0.25 resolution, so as not to slow down the rate at which layers are drawn. Some of the points may have been lost in this reduction.
    While it is a pretty picture, it is hard to interpret this raster data without the addition of vector data to orient our brains.
    fire now on map

  • In Construct mode, click and drag the Countries layer from the Data Library to the Layer List to add it to the map. Place it on top of the image. If you need to move this vector layer above the fire image layer, click and drag it up the Layer List.
  • The Countries layer is now on the map and visible, but it is hiding the layer below it. Edit the properties of the Countries layer so that only the outlines are visible on top of this predominately black image.
  • Now the image makes more sense to our brains. It has been given context by the Countries outline.
    view map with countries

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    How Do Fire Prone Areas Change throughout the year?

    1. In Construct mode, click the Import New Layer from File add layer from file button. Navigate to the data folder, select the FEB_2010_MODIS.shp file, and click Open.
    2. My World will ask if the Data is in Latitude and Longitude. It is so click OK
      projection check
    3. Here is what the map looks like with after the FEB_2010_MODIS.shp layer has been added.
      fire data layer has been added

  • To look for patterns in the fire data, return to Visualize mode and in the Edit Appearance of Layer window classify the layer by Julian date field. Break the classification into four classes of graduated symbols using an equal interval classification. By using four classes you are breaking up the month's worth of data into weekly intervals. The Julian calendar is often used in science. On a Julian calendar, January 1 is day one of the year and December 31st is day 365.
  • Make FEB_2010_MODIS.shp the active layer by clicking on its name in the Layer List. Then click the Zoom to Active Layer zoom to active layer button.
    Modis on map and zoomed in
  • What state and region had the most fires in February?

  • Choose File > Save As.. and navigate to the AspenAE folder. Name your project Feb_Fires. My World will automatically add the appropriate extension (.m3vz) when you click Save.
    • Movie Icon

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    Create a Map to Tell a Story of Interest to You

    This is the screenshot that you will post to your discussion group for your required weekly assignment.

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    Resources


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    Movies on this Page

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    How to download movies

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    Flash Video Versions

    Download these versions to play on your computer. You'll need an appropriate movie player to view the file, such as Flash Player, Real Player (Mac / Win), or Adobe Media Player.

    Movie Icon Investigating the Spread of the Fire Using Database Queries in My World

    Movie Icon Investigating the Spread of the Fire Using Spatial Queries in My World

    Movie Icon Creating a New Project in My World

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    iPod Versions

    Download these version to play on your iPod or iPhone.

    Movie Icon Investigating the Spread of the Fire Using Database Queries in My World

    Movie Icon Investigating the Spread of the Fire Using Spatial Queries in My World

    Movie Icon Creating a New Project in My World


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