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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Proportional Circle Map

This map portrays wine consumption in Europe for the year 2005 using proportional circles. The map was created in ArcView and then brought into Adobe Illustrator for editing and the addition of the proportional circles. They were sized using standard methods for circle size using the formula: symbol size= (max symbol size) * (value/max value). There were 5 classifications based on the grouping of consumption in 5 groups in a rough natural break format. There was a thought to add country names but the map was already busy. Maybe a second inset map could have been added to identify the countries.

GrayScale Population Change Map

This is a grayscale map of the change in US population from the 1990 to 2000 US Census.
Population change was calculated from raw population totals for 1990 and 2000 census. These were then categorized by US Census division and then averaged using all states in each division. The 9 divisions were then converted into 5 roughly equal intervals. Thus allowing for easy comprehension of the map.
The map was created in Adobe Illustrator using the previously posted population change map created using a provided shapefile. All colors were removed first then gray scale added to create the map to allow for a correct consistent shading of each interval.
Intervals are comprised of two US Census divisions which have a similar percent change (within 1 or 2 percentage points) except for the final one which has one large division. This avoids the excessive clutter of each division having its own interval.