Lab 5

This weeks lab was mainly lead by ESRI who is one of the main leaders of GIS software in the entire business.  They have many different products to include the one we used this week, ArcMap.  ArcMap is an extremely powerful tool that allows you to do many different things from creating maps to exploring spatial statistics, which is what we did this week.  This weeks lab was all about the relationship of points to each other.  We took a training about spatial statistics lead by ESRI, it consisted of 5 modules each with an activity to familiarize us to the tools that you can use in ArcMap.  We started with a map of temperature stations in Europe and changed it into what you see below:

 As you can see, I changed it quite a bit from the standard map with just grey points on it.  The green polygon in the center is the mean center which measures the average center based upon the mean.  The black cross is the median center which is just the middle location based upon the number of stations.  The shading of points is the temperature ranging from green being the coolest with red being the warmest.

 The above figure is the trend analysis that ArcMap allows you to do.  The reason I included it is because I found it way to neat not too.  I like the fact that is is a 3-D representation of the data points from the map.  You had to play around a little with the line of best fit because it uses a polynomial that you change the order of to find the line of best fit.  

The above figure is an example of the histogram feature in ArcMap.  The blue slected line is an outlier from the map.  By clicking on the outlier it highlighted the stations on the map to allow you to see what the cause of it being an oulier was.  For example, when I clicked on the low outlier of roughly 9 degrees, I found that the station was on a mountain top in Italy so the data wasn't wrong just had conditions not represented by the others.  

One problem I had this week was trying to add a scale bar.  It should have been simple, just click insert and choose the scale bar insert.  For some reason on my ArcMap it was greyed out.  I tried every layer and even adding other layers to place the scale bar in.  I eventually just gave up and said the map was not to scale, which wasn't wrong, just not following the directions.  

Overall I liked this lab because it gave us directed practice with ArcMap which is a very overwhelming tool if you just mess around with it because the terminology is very different and not like anything else I've used.  Also, we got to use AI more which is always welcome because I found that this week, I didn't have to resort to Googling to figure out what I needed to do.  This is a good sign because I am becoming more comfortable with the tools of GIS.