Frac Sand Suitability Part I

Before a suitability/risk model can be built, base data must be acquired.  This data includes environmental, transportation and demographic features.  A variety of agencies were used to import this data into a geodatabase in ArcGIS.

• The National Atlas provided a line feature class for railroads in Wisconsin.  Frac sand processes often use railways to transport silica sand from the mine to processing plants and oil wells.  This feature class was downloaded from National Atlas data and imported into the geodatabase.

• The United States Geologic Survey (USGS) provides a wealth of geographic data.  For the purposes of this model, elevation and land cover data was acquired from this agency.  USGS provided land cover data from 2006 in raster format.  The MRLC provided a description of the data and a legend for the raster codes.  A National Elevation Dataset was also in raster format.  The DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) had to be shared as two separate tiles because of the large storage capacities of the files.  In ArcGIS, the “Mosaic to New Raster” tool was used to merge the two tiles.  Both sets of data were imported as raster datasets in the geodatabase.

Figure 2-Land Cover Data
(Source: USGS)

Figure 3-Elevation Data
(Source: USGS)

• Cropland data was acquired through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Geospatial Data Gateway.  This information will be used to determine land cover in the suitability/risk model.

Figure 1- Cropland Data
(Source: USDA)

• The National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provided soil data for this model through the Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO).  This data was imported to the geodatabase as a feature class, the component table for soil data also had to be imported.  These features were joined through a simple relationship class using the primary key “MUKEY."

Figure 4- Soil & Railroad Data
(Source: NRCS, National Atlas)

Coordinate systems varied between each dataset.  In order for accurate representation and analysis of the data, a common coordinate system had to be set.  The datum of each dataset was inspected and a coordinate system was chosen based on two factors: common datum and area of interest.  The datum of each dataset was NAD 1983 and the area of interest was Western Wisconsin.  The NAD 1983 UTM Zone 15N coordinate system was chosen because it fit within the datum of all data and it was the best fit for the area of interest.