Minutes
UCIME Group Meeting
November 3, 2000
*** Important Dates and Announcements:
- The next UCIME group meeting will be December 1, 2000 at 10:00 am in Keith’s office.
- Jeff is going to present his work with the model in Stella on Monday at 1:00 in his office so that we all can learn about the model.
- Air Quality Control Board is having an all day meeting next Friday (11/10) that someone from our group should attend. If you are interested, talk to Keith.
- Update Reports from each team member:
- Helen:
- She gave a paper at the GIScience 2000 Conference in Savannah that will be written up and become a journal article.
- She will be giving a seminar next term on Landuse Change, which has had a lot of interest. This will be part of the UCIME project deliverables.
- Tim
:
- He has been working on a dissertation topic, as this needs to be defined shortly. As part of that effort, 6 different watershed models have been identified, of which one will be used depending on the watershed under study.
- He has formed a Watershed Support Group that is putting together a general information web page on Watershed Analysis and Modeling. An other objective of the group is to invite speakers to UCSB, of which we hope the first will be George Leavesley from the USGS (Denver) in January. Maybe Steen R. and Claes A. can come out from LANL to participate in Leavesley’s visit.
- We went over the UCIME web page that he has been working on. Comments: 1) The opening graphic had various objections. A change was recommended from making the present image more digital or changing it completely (possibly more photos representing natural to urban transitions). Tim will work with Susan on this. There were a few more comments on the contents. It was recommended to make a separate web page for Helen’s seminar for next term to facilitate the class, etc. and that would be linked to the UCIME web page. Internet access to UCIME group meeting minutes was discussed and they will continue to be posted.
- He has joined the Watershed Consortium formed by David Maidment and ESRI that is building the Arc GIS Hydro Data Model for ESRI. It is hoped that this will play a role in linking watershed modeling to the Urban Growth Model.
- Jeannette
:
- Not present because of back problems and is hoping to be on campus Monday.
- Xiaohang:
- She used Matlab to calculate the annual transition matrix and is now ready for the Santa Barbara data set so that she can do the calculation. With that, she can create the probability transition matrix and then start calibrating the model. She found the algorithm for the annual transition matrix but hasn’t coded it up yet, coming soon. This will help stabilize the transition matrix. The next step is to look at the actual observed changes in the transition probabilities, which is where the Santa Barbara data set comes in. Keith is working on the code for this part and all of this will be hard coupled into the Deltatron part of Sleuth.
- She went to GIScience 2000, gave a paper and enjoyed the conference, as it was a broadening experience. We then discussed the purpose of the conference and what the organizers were trying to accomplish.
- Melissa:
- She continues to work photo interpretation for the landuse coverages. She has an intern (Pat) helping out and he seems to be working out aok. The 1998 Landuse data layer is getting close to being done (within a couple of weeks) at Anderson Level 3. Monday she is going to send to Keith a segment to show to the Santa Barbara Foundation. Remaining for this first year (1998) is the extremes outside of the urban area.
- 1997 landuse coverage is what Pat will be concentrating on for his 6 hours a week. At the moment he has done 500-600 out of 3000 polygons. He is working at Anderson Level 3.
- Getting another intern might help out with the process and they could use one of the two PCs in Keith’s office or maybe get a new PC or more disk space. It might be possible to have Pat coordinating the new intern. Kimmy might be a good possibility.
- Jeff:
- Still working on the model in Stella.
- He has changed the traffic index into the actual traffic volume, which works well.
- On November 13th there is a meeting with the Board of the City of Santa Barbara, specifically the regional Economic Community Project (ECP), which is supported by the Community Environmental Council (CEC). If successful, the idea will then be taken to planners throughout the region to push forward with Smart Growth. The meeting will be a subgroup of the people from the last meeting.
- He is going to do a first run through on his presentation on Monday at 1:00 in his office so that we all can learn about the model.
- NetsimCreator is on its way and will be here soon. This software will enable us to put the model on the web to let people play with it. It takes some technical know-how to get this up and running (i.e. Visual Basic and Active Server Pages (ASP-NT)).
- Noah
:
- He is finishing up his masters by the end of this term and he will need a computer come next term.
- He is working with Max and Jeannette on a paper regarding the causes of fire in the urban areas of Santa Barbara.
- Bill Reiner has a project that Noah is going to help out on. The data is in Italian but somehow he will work around the language barrier.
- He wants to get into the coupling of fire models with the urban growth models, getting more into the C code in the process.
- Also he is working on the pseudo census by looking at the parcel maps and the dates when buildings were built to recreate the urban development in Santa Barbara, maybe comparing it to the results from the Urban Growth modeling effort. This might not give exact findings but it will give a general view of what happened.
- Shoot out still on line but we need to drum up interest.
- Keith
:
- He has been working on Fuzzy Density and tried to set up a table of expected building density by date, making an assumption that you can assign some figures. Then bring in all the composite GIF files and make a mosaic of different densities based on age. You could modify it based on the distance to transportation. He is working on the code for these steps. It comes out similar to Paul Sutton’s results.
B. Conferences up and coming:
- Aurora Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, is November 13, 2000.
- IALE Conference next year.