Aghanistan geospatial analysis

[Entropy]

I'm currently taking a graduate-level course on ArcGIS and geospatial analysis. As part of this course, I will be required to do a project on a topic of my choosing. Afghanistan will be my focus and rather than do something simply for a grade, I would like to help with a real-world problem in Afghanistan. So this is a call to the council for ideas/suggestions on a topic for my project. If you're in Afghanistan and there is some question you have that geospatial analysis can help answer, please PM me or post here.

Of course, since this is for a class, I have some significant LIMFACS:

1. Time: The course ends in late August, so I must have the project done by then. Additionally, if you need something by next week, I probably can't help you there either.

2. Classification: I have to use unclassified data, though FOUO might be possible.

3. Data: I need to be able to get the relevant data to answer the question. I don't really care what format it's in - I can process or format it as needed. There is a lot of data out there, but much of it is proprietary or held by NGO and other organizations and not directly published. Some of this I can acquire, some I cannot. If you have the data, that would be ideal.

4. Scope: It will just be me working on this project, so please bear that in mind.

Any and all suggestions and comments are welcome! Thanks!

[GeorgePBurdell]

In addition to posting this here, you might want to also contact the geospatial analysis team at the Open Source Center with this same information. They do great work and no doubt have a question/requirement that they could use you on. Everything they do is with open source.

[Ron Humphrey]

I'm currently taking a graduate-level course on ArcGIS and geospatial analysis. As part of this course, I will be required to do a project on a topic of my choosing. Afghanistan will be my focus and rather than do something simply for a grade, I would like to help with a real-world problem in Afghanistan. So this is a call to the council for ideas/suggestions on a topic for my project. If you're in Afghanistan and there is some question you have that geospatial analysis can help answer, please PM me or post here.

Of course, since this is for a class, I have some significant LIMFACS:

1. Time: The course ends in late August, so I must have the project done by then. Additionally, if you need something by next week, I probably can't help you there either.

2. Classification: I have to use unclassified data, though FOUO might be possible.

3. Data: I need to be able to get the relevant data to answer the question. I don't really care what format it's in - I can process or format it as needed. There is a lot of data out there, but much of it is proprietary or held by NGO and other organizations and not directly published. Some of this I can acquire, some I cannot. If you have the data, that would be ideal.

4. Scope: It will just be me working on this project, so please bear that in mind.

Any and all suggestions and comments are welcome! Thanks!

GeoInt, USGS, NOAA, etc for more depth in your project. Have fun

[Surferbeetle]

Entropy,

Coming from the Civil Affairs side of things Agriculture and Water are enduring issues with readily available data and may be of interest to you in this project. The Agricultural Engineering Department of your local university may be a good place for face-to-face help. One of my grad classes was on Evapotranspiration and we spent some time on developing Penman-Monteith and Priestly-Taylor evapotranspiration models. It was an interesting class and exercised database skills as well as modeling skills. Unfortunately, we did not have a GIS portion of the class but then I had my hands full with just the modeling and database portions.

Here are some links that might be of interest to you on this topic:

Simulation of winter wheat evapotranspiration in Texas and Henan using three models of differing complexity

Crop evapotranspiration (ET) is an important component of simulation models with many practical applications related to the efficient management of crop water supply. The algorithms used by models to simulate ET are of various complexity and robustness, and often have to be modified for particular environments. We used three crop models, CROPWAT, MODWht and CERES-Wheat, to simulate ET of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) grown at Bushland, Texas, and Zhengzhou, China, during multiple growing seasons in which ET was measured using lysimeter or soil water balance techniques

Comparison of methods used to estimate lake evaporation for a water budget of lake Seminole southwestern Georgia and Northwestern Florida

Seems to have a GIS portion...


Crop evapotranspiration - Guidelines for computing crop water requirements - FAO Irrigation and drainage paper 56


One of my class references....



Regards,

Steve

[Entropy]

Thanks for all the replies and PM's I've received so far. I'm sorry I haven't replied yet - hit a deer on the way home this weekend at oh-dark-thirty, which turned into a bit of an adventure.

[Mark Eichenlaub]

the guys at globalsecurity.com may be able to help

[Ken White]

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