Week 4 Oil Spill - GIS response summary, and Animation

The animation was part of our participation exercise and produced a six-frame animation of the extent of the oil spill, from 29th April 2010 to 26th May 2010.
The link to the animation is here: http://students.uwf.edu/db27/OilSpillExtents.avi

The hard part for me was getting the projections to line up. I finally did that by clearing the projection information for each oil extent shapefile individually, redefining the geographic coordinate system to what it said it was before, and then projecting it to the same projected coordinate system that it said it had before. Don't quite know why this worked, but I was thrilled to see that it did. The background files were unprojected, and when I projected them to the same coordinate system (that the oil spill files said they were originally, NAD UTM 16N), it all worked together. But not until I had tried every other unsuccessful combination of projection-on-the-fly, adding the (first projected) background files and then adding the (apparently projected) oil spill files, etc. etc. Once it worked though it was great.
An improvement on this animation would be to have the date of each oil spill extent display. I tried labeling in ArcMap, for the states and a label of the range of dates, but in animation all these labels continually flashed on and off, so I deleted the labels. There must be a better way!

On the role of GIS in disaster response, specifically in regard to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:
GIS has an essential role in disaster response, and its role is immediately visible to us in the oil spill maps in the New York Times and in this week's lab assignment. Below is a list of GIS involvement in disaster response, in general, and in the case of BP oil spill. After a disaster we can expect GIS to play an integral role in:
1) Showing the location of the event and the spread of its impace. In this case, GIS has been used to map the oil spill, both as oil on the water and as oil plumes.
2) Showing the location of vulnerable populations and their habitat. This could be people in homes at risk from a flood or an earthquake (and should have been prepared before an actual disaster). In the BP oil spill, the vulnerable populations include marine life, birds, shore animals. It also will include information about fishing grounds and other places (see below) at risk since the livelihood of fishermen and others whose livelihood depends on the ecology of the Gulf is also threatened.
3) Showing locations where there is damage or harm, to people and/or habitat. After an earthquake this could be where buildings are damaged; since the oil spill GIS has probably been used to map where oil-soaked birds or marine mammals have been rescued or found. Such mapping also gives more specific and recent information about vulnerable population whereabouts.
4) Showing the location of measures taken. In the case of the oil spill, examples might include where oil booms are, or are recommended (and whether they are one or the other) and information about cleanup (see below)
4) Showing where assistance centers are, from hospitals to FEMA offices to animal shelters. In the case of the oil spill, it might include FEMA offices, wildlife rescue sites, places for volunteers to go, other government cleanup staging areas, etc.
5) Educating the media in all sorts of ways: about where the damage is, the extent of the cleanup, etc. etc. An oil spill example is the GIS map of the extent of the closed-to-fishing boundary, an updated version of which has been shown daily in the New York Times.
6) Helping to direct the cleanup, in terms of recording where what is needed and what it will take in materials and people and costs, as well as recording locations where workers have gone to clean up and the status of those efforts. In the case of the oil spill, this would include a lot of coastal information about the booms, the wildlife cleaning and marsh protection efforts, and more.