The following tutorial is an adaptation of Rick Thomas' excellent GIS Dust Bowl tutorial for the In Time and Place library of teaching materials for American History. Thomas' focus is in teaching GIS skills. Many humanities and social sciences instructors may want to use these resources, but feel that teaching GIS to students is outside the scope of their curriculum. This ArcGIS Explorer Desktop adaptation of the Dust Bowl unit is meant to aid instructors who do not have access to ArcGIS software or who might not have the time to teach GIS skills in the classroom.
Install ArcGIS Explorer Desktop
If you do not have it already, you will need to install ArcGIS Explorer Desktop. You can download the program for free at the ArcGIS Resource Center Download page.
Follow all instructions under the topics, "Getting Ready to Use ArcGIS Explorer Desktop," and Download ArcGIS Explorer Desktop. If you require assistance with the download process, click on the yellow Get Support button at the bottom of the left hand side of the download page.
Download Dust Bowl Tutorial Files
- To find files for this tutorial, go to https://depts.drew.edu/envstudies/GIS Tutorials/Dust Bowl.zip
- A dialog box will appear titled, "Opening Dust Bowl.zip." Save the file to your computer's desktop.
- Navigate to the desktop of your computer and unzip the file. To do this, right click on the Dust Bowl.zip folder.
- Choose Extract All. The Windows Extraction Wizard will appear.
- Click Next. Make sure that the field under "Files will be extracted to this directory" points to your computer's desktop.
- If it does not point to your computer's Desktop, click the Browse button. The select a destination dialog box will appear.
- Choose the Desktop option that appears at the very top of the window in the dialog box. You may need to use the croll bar on the right hand side of the window to see the Desktop Option.
- Click OK.
- Once this field points to your computer's Desktop, click Next. Windows will unzip the file and tell you that the extraction is complete. Click the Finish button.
Getting Started with ArcGIS Explorer Desktop
Once it's been successfully installed and you've downloaded the software, open up ArcGIS Explorer.
Change the Basemap
The default Basemap in ArcGIS Explorer is a satelite photo mosaic. This can be distracting when dealing with certain kinds of data, so users may want to change the Basemap to something less visually distracting.
- On the Home tab in the Maps group, click on the Basemap button. A drop down menu will display a set of Basemap options.
- Use the scroll bar on the right hand side of the Basemap drop down menu to scroll down to the bottom of the list.
- Chose the Light Gray Canvas map by highlighting and clicking it once.
Now the map background is neutral, and is ready to have the Dust Bowl tutorial data layers added to it.
Add Dust Bowl Tutorial Layers to ArcGIS Explorer Desktop
For each of the following exercises in the Dust Bowl tutorial, you will add the layer files in reverse order. This will insure that they are ordered properly by group and by month/year so that users can make sense of all the data categories.
Examining Conclusions Worksheet
Navigate to the Dust Bowl folder on your computer's Desktop. You should see a list of files like this: