Wildfire lesson draft has been coded, compiled, and uploaded. I am running out of hours on this project until completion in June so I don't think it's wise for me to spend more time on this. Sorting out issues with a lot of the data took a lot more time than I would have hoped. Although it's pretty well rounded out, there are several areas that require polishing. If I were to do this stuff it would prevent me from coding another lesson.
[ ] Introduction and background materials require citations. These should be pretty straightforward. All the talking points are pretty basic forestry, wildfire, climate change facts that can be found in the introduction or discussion of peer reviewed papers quickly.
[ ] Code commenting and narrative explanation. Because of the nature of the data, the code required more custom functions to iteratively process satellite data in the study area. While they are commented well, it probably needs either more comments or explanation. I can help with this if it's confusing at times. We could also break up the code chunks even further, but some are long due to the functions being long.
[ ] print() and head() commands with explanations. Lots of the code chunks continue on while rarely taking a second to inspect and describe the data structure. A lot of this is done in callout boxes, but it's probably not enough. We should take moments to print the FIRMS point dataframe, the GOES raster structure, the raw wind vector dataframe, etc. and explain the structure.
[ ] None of the figures have narrative explanation interpreting what we see. Describing how the fire surrounds the town, comparing the firms dots to the viirs burned area, describing the somewhat shocking conditions at the time of evacuation. Examples of this are in my other lessons.
[ ] Plot detail consistency. I fixed a lot, but some of the plots have inconsistent features. Specifically the large elliptical boundary is grey (what i wanted) in most, but like a blue color in others. Some of the captions might be wrong in describing the colors of the yellowknife boundary or other indicators.
[ ] The grey borders on the concave hull fire complex are too thick when in the qmd file vs the console while deving. Might want to play with alpha of the hulls also.
[ ] Plot naming consistency. I re-arranged the presentation after coding up the subsections. The naming of the plots are probably out of order in some places. Specifically when the VIIRS burned area comes in, because it was last at first. I'm talking about the order p1, p2, p3, etc. There may be other signs of this but I tried to clean it up on read-through.
[ ] "In the news" and callout boxes. There are no in the news callout boxes. News stories on the plume moving into northeast US or other wildfire stories about California and the mountain west would be good.
[ ] I had other callout boxes and data science review stuff automated. I got rid of some of the dumb ones, but others might need to just be woven into the narrative and remove the callout box outline. Some of the smaller ones should be placed in the margin. I didn't read the knowledge checks too carefully, but they seemed fine.
[ ] In line with the previous two points for making it visually more appealing--some type of fire cycle or other wildfire graphic in the intro would be good.
Those are things I would consider basics for completion. Here are 2 items that are more challenging I gave up on due to time constraints:
[ ] I have working code for an animated figure showing fire progression. I did not have time to figure out the right setting/structure to get it to render in the quarto file. The file /scratch/m302-scratch.R has the code to make the animation. You might need to add the yellowknife boundary code from the main lesson, but other than that I think it's all there.
[ ] Automated access to NASA earthdata AWS cloud. The NASA burned area data is available on earthdata cloud, but I could not get it to work with just code. There are limited examples on Openscapes for python access, but even those are poorly detailed. I could not get my earthdata creds (with or without a netrc file) to generate a successful aws key with code only. Someone with more time and interest could probably sort this out and make just a vignette on that. I'm guessing openscapes would host it also.
Wildfire lesson draft has been coded, compiled, and uploaded. I am running out of hours on this project until completion in June so I don't think it's wise for me to spend more time on this. Sorting out issues with a lot of the data took a lot more time than I would have hoped. Although it's pretty well rounded out, there are several areas that require polishing. If I were to do this stuff it would prevent me from coding another lesson.
Those are things I would consider basics for completion. Here are 2 items that are more challenging I gave up on due to time constraints:
[ ] I have working code for an animated figure showing fire progression. I did not have time to figure out the right setting/structure to get it to render in the quarto file. The file /scratch/m302-scratch.R has the code to make the animation. You might need to add the yellowknife boundary code from the main lesson, but other than that I think it's all there.
[ ] Automated access to NASA earthdata AWS cloud. The NASA burned area data is available on earthdata cloud, but I could not get it to work with just code. There are limited examples on Openscapes for python access, but even those are poorly detailed. I could not get my earthdata creds (with or without a netrc file) to generate a successful aws key with code only. Someone with more time and interest could probably sort this out and make just a vignette on that. I'm guessing openscapes would host it also.
https://github.com/ciesin-geospatial/TOPSTSCHOOL-disasters/blob/420c217a8a4615a8d3b9d0a3c7a586ca3429d1bd/m302-wildfire-assessment.qmd
https://github.com/ciesin-geospatial/TOPSTSCHOOL-disasters/blob/420c217a8a4615a8d3b9d0a3c7a586ca3429d1bd/docs/m302-wildfire-assessment.html
https://github.com/ciesin-geospatial/TOPSTSCHOOL-disasters/blob/420c217a8a4615a8d3b9d0a3c7a586ca3429d1bd/scratch/m302-scratch.r