Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Final Project Proposal - Chernobyl Disaster

For my final project, I will be attempting to recreate an map of the Chernobyl  Disaster's radiation extent on either Europe or Pripyat, the abandoned city next to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I'm planning on a couple of things depending on how my research goes; if I can find enough information on the abandon city, I'd like to make a map that shows various radiation levels and use the map to help determine whether or not the city is habitable. If there isn't enough information for that, I will instead create a map of Europe and display radiation levels by country due to the Chernobyl Disaster during the year 2014. The audience for this map would be Europeans with concerns especially in and around the area of Ukraine and Belarus. The information would also be useful because, as I stated earlier, a map that properly displays radiation levels will help us determine if certain areas are suitable enough for us to live.
Maps
As far as maps go, ideally I want to end up with an isoline map of Pripyat that shows various radiation levels however I am worried that there will not be enough variation throughout the city for it to be worth mapping, so I will revert to a chloropleth map of Europe and most likely some of western Asia showing the levels of radiation by country.
Data Set
The data set will be retrieved from most likely from the State Agency of Ukraine in Management of the Exclusion Zone as this group is the one who set up the perimeters for the explosion. Their data is public so access for the information would be easy. It is also possible to determine radiation levels using a decay algorithm, but with numerous other variables, this way of retrieving data will most likely be impractical.
Basemap
As stated earlier, the Basemap will be either that of Pripyat or Europe and Western Asia.
The main challenge for me is definitely going to be my dataset. Even with the proper a data, I expect an isoline map of Pripyat is going to be difficult to create especially since my purpose for this map will hypothetically determine whether or not people die so accuracy will be essential.

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