GIS is used by Carleton students in their comprehensive projects and independent studies in a variety of ways.  Here are some examples:

Using GIS to Join Data by Geography

• Bayesian Modeling of Spatial data. Mathematics, 2008-2009 (Advisor: K. St. Clair)

  • This project models and attempts to forecast low level atmospheric ozone concentration across Minnesota in a Bayesian setting.  The model used is based on Mc Millan et al., and is hierarchical and incorporates nearest neighbors spatial and time series parameters.

    The results indicate that ozone concentration is primarily dependent on the previous day's ozone concentration in the same location and the concentration to the west, with temperature and pressure also significant factors.  The predictions made are fairly accurate but miss isolated spikes in concentrations which limits the utility of the model for forecasting purposes.

    ESRI ArcMap 9.3 was used to create a grid that covers the study area and to generate the centroids of the grid cells. Ozone and weather data from the ozone and weather stations closest to the grid cell centroids were joined together by the spatial join functionality of ArcMap.

Using GIS to Join Data by a Common Field

• CMS Direct. Mathematics, 2008-2009 (Advisor: L. Chihara)

  • This project applies various statistical and data mining techniques on sales data from CMS Direct Corporation and socio-demographic data to find trends that might be of interest.

    ESRI ArcMap 9.3 was used to join sales data stored in an Excel table to the corresponding zip codes and to visualize the data in a form of maps.

Using GIS to Implement Map Algebra

(To be completed)

Using GIS to Analyze Visibility

(To be completed)