As the Wallow fire rages on in Arizona, we decided to have a look and see how far the fire has spread over the last week. We began by adding the USGS Hazards service, which publishes information about current floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and wildfire perimters.
To add the service, we clicked Add Content, and then chose ArcGIS Online:
In the ArcGIS Online search window we entered the keyword “hazards” and found the USGS Natural Hazards map service, which we added to our map:
Here’s what our map looked like after adding the service:
Our next step was to enable the popup window for the service (turned off by default for service layers) by opening the layer properties, and enabling the popup window display:
Zooming in to southeastern Arizona, it was pretty easy to spot the Wallow fire, currently one of the largest in Arizona history having consumed nearly 400,000 acres.
We changed the default World Imagery basemap to the World Topographic basemap so we could clearly see the perimeter, and clicked the fire perimeter near is origin. We were first surprised to see 11 features found, but after pondering this for a moment it made sense – the 11 features were overlapping boundaries published in the service marking the growth of the perimeter from the start of the fire to its current extent.
Clicking the first in the list, we found the perimeter for 5/30/2011 (as shown in the date field for the feature):
We wanted to extract this feature from the service, and use it to compare the extent on that date to its present extent. To do that, we clicked the Create Note tool in the popup window, as shown below:
This added the polygon (the fire perimeter for that date) to our Contents. We then did this twice more, adding the perimeters for 6/5/2011 and 6/7/2011. We changed the colors for the perimeters, and below is our result: yellow is the fire on 5/30, orange on 6/5, and red on 6/7:
Using this technique we were easily able to extract features from the USGS service, and provide a better look at how the fire has spread over the last week.
