week 8 lab

For week 8, we had to create two different sets of three maps for LADWP. These were to show the precipitation in Los Angeles County for this season so far, the season average, and then the difference between the seasons:
here is the first set, using Kriging



here is the next section, using IDW:


It appears as though there have been some differences in the changing amounts of rainfall in Los Angeles county. Some of the areas have more rainfall this season than in the past, while other stations have been reporting less rainfall than usual. Although the rainy season is not over yet, there were quite a few areas that were reporting quite a bit more rainfall than usual. For example, the station in Tanbark reported 16.05 more inches of rain this season than for the average season. Additionally, there were also some places that reported less rainfall than they usually got as well. The Topanga canyon control station usually reports getting 5.5 or so more inches of rain per season.

I think that this overall shift towards a lot of rain, versus, normal seasonal precipitation, could be a result of the cooler temperatures that come with climate change. Even though some parts of the world are heating up, of course, there are some areas that are receiving more and more intense weather. Even though these small shifts in the Los Angeles area do not prove anything, there are some differences between this year and the normal rate for Los Angeles which probably should be kept track of. There are some areas, of course, which have less rain than other parts of Los Angeles, so perhaps the rain is just shifting in the areas in which it is the most intense.

I think that the more effective way to map this, at least for the rain project, was the kriging form. For some reason, I thought that it was more detailed than the IDW way of making the raster model, although perhaps the parameters of the IDW model just had to be adjusted. However, I really thought that there would be more difference between the ways of making the raster models. I think perhaps the ArcGIS guide maybe exaggerated the differences between the models for effect, as they did not seem that different until I did the model of the difference between the rainfall time periods. In the difference between "normal" and this season so far, the two different models seemed a little bit more different than they did in the other maps. Overall, I though this was a valuable project, however, because I think the ability to create such types of maps is very valuable in the GIS field.