Suppose you are working with a government official in Ukraine who wants to assess current radiation levels near the destroyed Chernobyl power plant. She wants this assessment taken at multiple locations but only within 10 km of the plant. What geoprocessing operation would be used to establish the area in which it would be appropriate to place sensors?
What type of coordinate system should be used (or not used) for the analysis in question 1? You can be general here.
Suppose you are working for transportation consulting firm that is conducting a network analysis project in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. You obtain road data (shapefiles) for the entire state, but you are not interested in the roads outside of the metro. You have two datasets: a line shapefile of the roads, and a polygon shapefile of the extent of the metropolitan area. What geoprocessing operation should be used to eliminate the superfluous roads?
Suppose you are working for the National Weather Service on a project to determine how tornadoes impact the landscape in Nebraska in the years following an event. Your boss decides that you ought to exclude urban areas as they transform quickly due to unnatural causes (i.e. human intervention). You possess a LANDSAT image of vegetation in the state of Nebraska and a shapefile of urban areas in the state. What geoprocessing operation would you use to exclude these urban areas from the analysis?
Suppose you are working for an urban planning consulting firm on a land use project in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. You gather data on the current use of buildings in the area (e.g., office, retail, industrial, single family residential, multi-family residential, etc.). In some rare cases, buildings straddle city lines, causing single buildings to appear as multiple facilities. What geoprocessing option would you use to get these disjointed facilities to appear as one?