Today's progress

Today I finished the final downloads of all of the county level data sets that I need. I now have a huge collection of data for the study area which is about 9GB total. Now that I have finished collecting and organizing the data, I can begin to do analysis and start to map rock glaciers. I will hopefully be able to begin analysis this weekend.

Since the orthophotos that I have collected are organized by grid (high resolution) it seems that they are very large and make the computer very slow when loading. Not to mention that each county has about 30 raster files associated with it (see screenshot below). I will be using these for now, but I am in the progress of downloading the composite images for each county that are clipped to the county boundary. Unless there is some way that I can combine all the grid images from the current ortho-photos that I do have, I don't think they will be very useful and they take up alot of space. Once I have the smaller, newer NRCS composite orthos I can compare the 2 and see which is best.


It's obvious in this screen shot that the orthos are defined by the ortho quad grids. This is useful when indexing the files on a server, but it makes it so that adjacent counties often share the same grids. I could manually clip these but for the time being I am going to check on the other orthos available to see if they will suffice.

I have also finally been able to view the DEM elevation data that Brad sent me, along with the hill shades for that area. It seems like the current extent of his data doesn't entirely fill out the study area so additional elevation files will be needed (see screenshot below). I already have a few of these 10-m DEM's for the area that is missing and I will add them in later when I know exactly what is missing.
By looking at this screen shot you can see that the upper north and west side of the study area are not completed. I am currently in the process of downloading the 10-m DEM's for the counties that are not included.

While I had time today I went ahead and calculated slope, aspect, and zonal statistics for the DEM's that I do have. I will post a few screenshots of this stuff below as well.

This huge amount of data that I have now collected is much too large for my flash drive, which was my backup storage previously. I do have an Adrive account with 50GB and I have (slowly) been uploading the data there for a backup. Currently the main copies are residing on my local machine in the visualization center where I do most of my work.

Update:

I have determined the following counties need DEM data since the current extent isn't large enough:

• Montezuma County
• Dolores County
• San Miguel County
• Montrose County
• Gunnison County
• Saguache County
• Ouray County
• La Plata County
  

Completed 26/90 hours as of March 17th, 2009