Posts in gis

Learn to add magnetic declination to all your QGIS maps and charts! Part 1 is here.

QGIS has a multitude of amazing, community-supported plugins for almost any purpose. Today I'll talk you through how to install a QGIS plugin, Magnetic Declination. To use it for the first time, check out Add a compass rose here.

You could perhaps tell from some previous posts that I'm a bit of a geospatial data nerd. In keeping with that, for several years I've been searching on and off for reliable sources of elevation/topographic data. This week, at long last, I think my search can be over.

The short version: You can download elevation data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and then generate contour lines from that.

Mt. Erie Fire has had a dataset of hydrant locations for many years now, based on data we originally got from Skagit County. We also recently got access to a dataset from one of our mutual aid partners to the north, Anacortes, which includes some of the Public Utility District hydrants they've been taking over of late. The tricky bit: some hydrants are represented in both datasets, with slightly different positions and metadata. This is a summary of how I finally learned how to spatial join in order to construct one dataset of hydrant locations covering both MEFD and Anacortes's service areas.

As discussed previously, I've benefitted a lot from studying my district very explicitly. Generating maps automatically played a huge role in that process, and I wanted to share a high-level overview of how to do this yourself in case any other GIS nerds are also fire nerds, or vice versa.

At the start of this year, I rejoined Mount Erie Fire Department (MEFD), a volunteer fire + rescue district just south of Anacortes, WA. Onboarding with the district involves learning a great deal: about fire, rescue, EMS, standard operating procedures...and the district itself.