Showing posts with label GIS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GIS. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Organizing your digital files as a geoscientist

Hi everyone! If you're stuck in quarantine like we are now in April 2020 because of the COVID19 disease, or for some other reason, now might be the perfect time to re-organize your digital file system. 

About a week after I graduated, I applied for my first job, and about two weeks after that, I reported to work. During that month of inactivity, I didn't switch to a new file system, so throughout my first year of work, I was mostly creating new folders on-the-fly. This, of course, lead to a very messy file system! At some point in the middle of my second year, I just had to do something about it.

This begs the question, "what is a file system for?" Well, in its simplest form, it's to allow you to find something easily. If you have a small number of files, you don't really need one. That's why I survived for a while without one. But, as a working geoscience grad student, you'll know that we eventually end up with a ton of files, involved in many different aspects of our lives.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Calculating the strikes of lineaments through GIS (ArcMap 10.4)

Hi everyone! I'll be outlining a way to automatically calculate the end-to-end strike/trend values of lineaments or faults which you have plotted in GIS software. This method uses ArcGIS, but can be adjusted and followed for QGIS. Let's get to it.

Note: When dealing with digital structural data, azimuthal bearing is the convention of choice. If you are used to quadrantal bearing, slowly re-familiarize yourself with the azimuth concept, as it is much simpler to encode.

Software used: ArcMap 10.4

0. Make sure your files use a UTM projection.

1. Open the attribute table of your lineament shapefile.

2. Add fields for the starting x and y coordinates, ending x and y coordinates. I used a Double filetype. Calculate these by right-clicking the field heading and select Calculate Geometry...