Week 5 - Spatial Statistics

This week's lab took place via ESRI's Virtual Classroom - we completed the 'Exploring Spatial Patterns in Your Data Using ArcGIS' course. We covered QQ Plots, Median and Mean Centers, Voronoi Maps - all kinds of little analysis tools to help determine the nature of your data.

View of the map created during the 'Explore the values of your data' exercise.

Several maps were created during the ESRI course but I decided to share this one. Above is a view of weather stations in western and central Europe (symbolized by the dots). I found the mean and median centers by running the appropriate tool scripts (found in the Statistical Analysis tool box). The purple ellipse represents the directional distribution, which is also a tool found under the Statistical Analysis toolbox.

The mean and median centers are fairly close together, which is a good thing - I don't have any obvious outliers here in terms of spatial extent, although the sheer amount of weather stations in the Alps did pull the median center a bit south. The directional deviation ellipse was set to 1 standard deviation away from the mean center, and it shows that the majority of my weather stations trend east/west within the center of Europe. The ellipse is fairly large, and there are several weather station locations outside of it, which indicates that my data is fairly well spread out.

I found the ESRI course to be quite interesting, once I figured out exactly what was going on with all those tools! I still would like to do a bit more reading up on what each tool does to the data before I start going blindly forth using them - but it is very heartening to know that the tools presented in the course are very easy to use, and it's generally easy to understand their results.