Deepwater Horizon oil spillThe Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the "BP oil spill") was an industrial disaster that began on 20 April 2010 off of the coast of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, considered to be the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry and estimated to be 8 to 31 percent larger in volume than the previous largest, the Ixtoc I oil spill, also in the Gulf of Mexico. The United States federal government estimated the total discharge at .
Exxon Valdez oil spillThe Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989. Exxon Valdez, an oil supertanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company bound for Long Beach, California struck Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef, west of Tatitlek, Alaska at 12:04 a.m. and spilled (or 37,000 tonnes) of crude oil over the next few days. The Exxon Valdez spill is the second largest in U.S. waters, after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume of oil released.
Geographic information systemA geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database, however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system also to include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, the body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations.
Geographic information scienceGeographic information science (GIScience, GISc) or geoinformation science is a scientific discipline at the crossroads of computational science, social science, and natural science that studies geographic information, including how it represents phenomena in the real world, how it represents the way humans understand the world, and how it can be captured, organized, and analyzed. It is a sub-field of geography, specifically part of technical geography.
Geographic data and informationGeographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also called geospatial data and information, georeferenced data and information, as well as geodata and geoinformation. Approximately 90% of government sourced data has a location component. Location information (known by the many names mentioned here) is stored in a geographic information system (GIS).
QGISQGIS is a free and open-source cross-platform desktop geographic information system (GIS) application that supports viewing, editing, printing, and analysis of geospatial data. QGIS functions as geographic information system (GIS) software, allowing users to analyze and edit spatial information, in addition to composing and exporting graphical maps. QGIS supports raster, vector and mesh layers. Vector data is stored as either point, line, or polygon features. Multiple formats of raster images are supported, and the software can georeference images.
GDALThe Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is a computer software library for reading and writing raster and vector (e.g. ), and is released under the permissive X/MIT style free software license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It may also be built with a variety of useful command line interface utilities for data translation and processing. Projections and transformations are supported by the PROJ library.
InterpolationIn the mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points. In engineering and science, one often has a number of data points, obtained by sampling or experimentation, which represent the values of a function for a limited number of values of the independent variable. It is often required to interpolate; that is, estimate the value of that function for an intermediate value of the independent variable.
MethodologyIn its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bringing about a certain goal, like acquiring knowledge or verifying knowledge claims. This normally involves various steps, like choosing a sample, collecting data from this sample, and interpreting the data. The study of methods concerns a detailed description and analysis of these processes.
GeoreferencingGeoreferencing or georegistration is a type of coordinate transformation that binds a digital raster image or vector database that represents a geographic space (usually a scanned map or aerial photograph) to a spatial reference system, thus locating the digital data in the real world. It is thus the geographic form of . The term can refer to the mathematical formulas used to perform the transformation, the metadata stored or within the image file to specify the transformation, or the process of manually or automatically aligning the image to the real world to create such metadata.
Windows ServerWindows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a group of operating systems (OS) for servers that Microsoft has been developing since July 27, 1993. The first OS that was released for this platform is Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server. With the release of Windows Server 2003, the brand name was changed to Windows Server. The latest release of Windows Server is Windows Server 2022, which was released in 2021. Microsoft's history of developing operating systems for servers goes back to Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server.
Multivariate interpolationIn numerical analysis, multivariate interpolation is interpolation on functions of more than one variable (multivariate functions); when the variates are spatial coordinates, it is also known as spatial interpolation. The function to be interpolated is known at given points and the interpolation problem consists of yielding values at arbitrary points . Multivariate interpolation is particularly important in geostatistics, where it is used to create a digital elevation model from a set of points on the Earth's surface (for example, spot heights in a topographic survey or depths in a hydrographic survey).
