Monday, April 27, 2009

Wind Farm Potential Site














This site lies on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan which has nearly constant high winds year round(NREL) which is the primary factor when locating a wind farm.
The area lies to the north of Little Sable Lighthouse which along with Big Sable Lighthouse to the north of the site have had verifiable wind gauge measurements for several years.
BERR planning criteria are met by the following:
1. Wind speed is well above that necessary for wind turbines.
2. Ornithology is debatable regardless although birds are common in the area.
3. Noise is not an issue as the area is sparsely populated.
4. Shadow flicker not an issue as the area is sparsely populated.
5.Shipping impact would not matter as the site is not near a shipping lane.
6. Visual impact could be an issue except the area lies north of Silver Springs State Park and presumably people would not likely visit the site. Also it is not near many roads but is in an agricultural area where many turbines are commonly located.
I have personally verified high winds on several visits to the area.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Georgia Rainfall Isohyet Map




















This map portrays Georgia annual rainfall using isohyets. They are in 5 inch annual rainfall intervals. The map was done in Adobe Illustrator freehand.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Immigration Flow Map













Well, here is a try at a flow map. Never fully got the hang of the curved line thing but gave it an attempt anyway. North America was an issue as it splits between Canada and Mexico/Central America. The two arrows combine to make the width of the 339K North American immigration total. Most being from Mexico/Central America.
Adobe Illustrator can be difficult to use which takes away from trying to use the proper mapping techniques.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Cartograms




















These are cartograms of world GDP for the year 2004. On top is a non continuous cartogram that was created in ArcMap and finished in Adobe Illustrator for the legend creation.
The bottom map is a continuous cartogram was created wholly in ArcMap as the cartogram script creates a shapefile which allows easy insertion of a legend.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Freehand Dot Map




















Roughly 1500 dots were manually added using Adobe Illustrator to a map of Florida representing housing unit density. Each dot represents 4 units of density because the lowest density was around 4 units per square mile.
The highest density areas really became solid color as there was not enough room to fit all dots in a coalesced manner. If the ratio was increased then low density counties would not get a dot even though they do have housing density. If the dots were made smaller then they were barely visible. A compromise was made to make the dots .5 points and use a color that was visible to try and offset the problems. This worked to a point but still not perfect in my estimation.