Final Day Progress 5/7

Today I finished the scanning of all orthophotos that I had for the study area. I now have a mostly completed rock glacier database with locations marked as point features.

The only thing left for me to do is find someway to get the data to Brad so it can be used at a later stage.

I will most likely send him my completed rock glacier database, since it is a relatively small shapefile. The things that take up the most space seem to be the DEM data and orthophotos which are readily available on other websites.

Currently completed 90/90 hours as of 5/7/2009

Progress for 5/5

Today I have been working on scanning through the additional orthophotos that I have left. I have finished scanning the following counties today:

• Dolores county
• Gunnison county
• Saguache county

The only counties that I have left to scan are:

• Conejos county
• Archuleta county
• Rio Grande county

These last 3 counties have relatively small places to scan since they lie on the periphery of my study area and only have a few places with a high probability or rock glaciers.

I also currently have about 750 possible rock glaciers labeled in my rock glacier database, which is much higher than the initial 600 in the original paper.

I will most likely finish up the scanning of the remaining 3 counties tomorrow, and since I have 6 hours left in the independent study I will try to eliminate any errors and gather up all of my data so that I can give it to Brad before the semester is over with.

Currently completed 85/90 hours as of 5/5/2009

Progress for 5/1

Today I was able to complete the scanning of 3 counties for my rock glacier database. These 3 counties (La Plata, Hinsdale, and Mineral county) were the hardest yet since they were right in the center of the study area. This meant that nearly the whole county fell into the "probable rock glacier site" overlay I have been using. So basically I had to scan through the whole counties quadrant by quadrant looking for rock glaciers....but I am finally done with these hard counties.

So far I have scanned:

• Ouray county
• La Plata county
• San Miguel county
• San Juan county
• Hinsdale county
• Mineral county

The following counties will be much easier since only a portion of the county needs to be scanned. The remaining counties to be scanned are:

• Dolores county
• Gunnison county
• Sagauche county
• Conejos county
• Archuleta county

And these counties are the only ones for which I haven't obtained orthophotography for yet:

• Rio Grande county
• Archuleta county

So for my last 10 hour of this independent study I am very confident that I will be able to finish these tasks in order to complete the preliminary rock glacier database. Obviously, it will need to be double checked and even field checked in some places, but that won't be my job.

The screenshot below is my progress as of today (5/1/2009) on the rock glacier database. I have the DEM as the base layer, probable rock glacier locations in orange, and actual rock glaciers as triangle-point features.



Currently completed 80/90 hours as of 5/1/2009

Progress for Wednesday 4/29

Today I started organizing my data and standardizing what I needed from each DEM file which I had split into four equal extents.

For each DEM extent I calculate:

• slope
• aspect
• hillshade
• elevation > 2800

From these I have been using the overlay of elevation to get an idea of where to look in the study area. This overlay covers a huge area but it's much easier to look at these spots than to clandestinely search around the map.

This image displays what areas in the study extent are greater than 2800m in Orange

Now that I have all the DEM files and county level data standardized I am going to simply focus on finishing the rock glacier database. I have finished finding rock glaciers in the upper left quadrant, and now I am going to complete the other ones with the 20 or so hours that I have left in this independent study.

As far as scanning the orthophotos I have totally finished the following counties:

• Ouray
• San Miguel
• San Juan

I am currently lacking the following:

• Mineral
• Hinsdale
• La Plata
• Dolores
• Gunnison
• Sagauche
• Conejos
• Rio Grande
• Archuleta

I have already downloaded hinsdale and La Plata counties orthophotos and I will be processing those two tomorrow. If I do 2-3 Counties a day I should be finished in time before the end of this independent study.

This screenshot show the current distribution of the rock glacier database as of 4/29/2009 with the DEM as the base layer, elevation > 2800 in orange, and rock glaciers as triangles.

Currently completed 74/90 hours as of 4/29/2009

Progress for 4/28

Today I was focused mainly on completing the rock glacier database. I found a new source of much higher resolution orthos that I'm using and it's making identification much easier. Today I finished finding all rock glaciers in San Miguel county and I hope to get finished with the database by sometime next week.

Here is a screenshot of rock glaciers that I found in San Miguel:





Currently completed 70/90 hours as of 4/28/2009

DEM processing and more rock glacier database features

I had been previously using Google Earth to find rock glaciers in the study area, using a overlayed layer that showed me the most likely places. I figured that I could easily convert the KML file over to ArcGIS but it seems like it won't be very efficient. I've decided to start using the orthophotos I have already downloaded and fully work in ArcGIS so that I can write features directly to a shapefile or database.

The first thing that I did today was divide my DEM and my study area up into 4 parts. I wanted to go back and process everything in sections since the original DEM file was so huge and hard to navigate around. I will be using these four study areas for the completion of the rock glacier database.

This screenshot shows the four areas the main study area is divided into. The overlap of the DEM is from the quadrangles of the original data. I am currently processing these DEMs so that they will be in four separate files as well, making processing the individual parts much easier. Since this clip operation is computationally intensive, I have left all four to finish overnight via a script.



The next thing that I will do is finish downloading the orthophotos for the areas that I need. Since not all the counties are actually favorable for rock glaciers, I will only get the files that I absolutely need and get rid of the rest. The orthophotos take up a lot of disk space.

I currently still only have about 150 rock glaciers in ArcGIS, I am hoping that I can find another source of orthos since my current ones don't seem to be the best quality. I am using Google Earth in conjunction with the older orthos in order to verify a rock glacier is actually there.

Later this week I hope to be fully finished with the rock glacier database so that I can start doing analysis on the ones that I have found.

Currently completed 66/90 hours as of 4/23/2009

Finished final poster and more glacier identification progress

I submitted my final poster for the undergrad symposium, although I was not able to be there due to some unforeseen problems with traveling.

The screenshot below shows what my final poster looked like, even though I didn't really get a chance to put refining touches on it, I think it worked out well.






What I have been working on mostly today is a way to refine my rules for locating probable rock glacier locations and trying to complete my final database. The original paper had about 600+ rock glaciers, and as of today I have about 110. I hope that by the end of the this Independent Study I will have a number close to that so that I can do some more analysis with the data.

Currently completed 60/90 hours as of 4/20/2009