Week one of the research project is now behind us! There are some interesting updates on the Environmental Science side of the project. First of all, I was able to find some interesting journal articles and books on the analysis of rainfall and its effects on spreading pesticides throughout the environment. Also, through NOAA and NWS, I found rainfall data as points across the United States and displayed them in ArcMap, with less to more rainfall displayed as red to green, respectively;

I then found National Land Cover data for 2001-2011. It was in a raster (image) format, so to properly display the rainfall points, I had to make a raster image out of the rainfall points, displayed as the orange transparency in the lower photo:

The multicolored layer in the photo is the land cover data. In the next few weeks, I will be analyzing the changes in land cover based on rainfall characteristics.