GIS Day!

This week we were to carry out or host a GIS Day event of some sort. There is an official GIS Day in November, at which time a person could attend various events being held on campuses around the US, or by GIS related businesses, such as ESRI. However, as it is spring right now, we all just held our own versions for our friends, families, co-workers, or other audience members.

My GIS Day consisted of a simple Powerpoint that I emailed to my parents to help them learn a bit more about GIS in general and what I have been doing this year. I also shared the slideshow with my husband, at the high class location of our kitchen table. We discussed the maps in the slideshow that I had made this year, and I answered any questions he had about GIS industry uses outside of those he is familiar with (flying and the military).

As he is a helicopter pilot, I thought it would be neat to do a little background research on how helicopter pilots use GIS and/or how it is relevant to them. Certainly cartography of flight maps is a big one, but what I found most was discussions, apps, and research on HLZs, or Helicopter Landing Zones. Basically a type of suitability analysis that produces a map of the best HLZs in an area and associated features that could be concerns to the pilot (such as telephone poles, etc.). While is has done some playing around with military software that looks at high resolution or 3D imagery of HLZs, he mostly just receives a map from a GIS Analyst when needed. So we were able to talk about suitability analysis, including the work being done to improve HLZ analysis with coded tools and weighted analysis. We also looked at the ESRI HLZ template app used to create basic HLZ maps. Here is the link to the app, which is free to download: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=363f4e2fd9b04e819db1099bcfb0af18

Finally, just for fun, I showed him a video by ESRI about a helicopter pilot who collects GIS data as a career: https://vimeo.com/3996516

All in all it was a nice evening with my husband and an interesting GIS Day where I learned as much as he did!