Ryan Pierson, Jeff Holcomb & Paul Andrus of Utah State Univeristy

Progress Report Number Two

We have been busy collecting and preparing data for the analysis for our research project. We started by importing all of the Dem Data available. We imported it, uncompressed it, and ran a command "folding" it to make it readable in the Arc Workspace. This placed a hard reutrn in the data after every 1024 bytes, I think. Following this, we patched all of the Dem files together inside of Arc after creating the files with the command "Demlattice." The command we used to create the patched "Cache" Valley, was "LatticeMerge." We tried this several times only to realize in the end, with Doug's help, that we cannot name Arc Workspaces with a Capital Letters. It, for some reason, throws the database into havoc. We finally accomplished this and it, "cache" is located in our "dem" sub-directory.

Next, we focused on importing the "Utah" coverage from the "pasture" project. This took a little bit of doing, because we didn't start out having permission to copy it. There is a command in UNIX entitled chmod which allows us to give others the permission to "read" from pasture's data. All's gettin' well on the homefront! We intend to use this data and color with categories we choose after collecting points throughout Cache Valley with the GPS system.

Here is an idea of what the Cache Landuse Map will look like

On April 27th, we traveled about Cache Valley collecting points with the the Trimble Navigation "GPS Pathfinder Basic Receiver" to locate points for analysis at a later time. We also used a reference point at the Logan Airport to make sure that our points are accurate. It was quite fun! We took the location right at the center of the crossroads of the runways! We wondering if it would find the "SV's", or satellites in enough time before airplanes descended upon us. We are truly dedicated to the cause of Geographic Research! We also interviewed a farmer on the crops he had planted in 1989, the year the data was collected for the LandSat images. On the way home, we thought we had better check the GPS to make sure that it was really giving us the points in the UTM coordinate system, so we placed the antennae on the sun roof of my car while driving back to USU. It worked great, although it looked a little weird.

On the morning of April 27th, we created an "IMG" file with the Dem "cache" file. We ran a Boolean command inside of "Grid" to allow us to make a gray composite image file from the raster file. We intend to lay the data of the clipped Utah coverage and the LandSat images on this Dem. Perhaps, if we can pull it off, we will plot a flight path over Cache Valley with the help of the GPS system next week.

So far, we have enjoyed working on this project. We feel that we have been making good progress as our goals and expectations are outlined. We simply need to occasionally seek guidance from Dr. Ramsey to make sure we're using the right nuts and bolts to get there.

The three culprits putting together this project. (:

AKA Larry (Jeff), Curly (Paul) & Moe (Ryan)!