Day: February 17, 2021

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Long dammed but still special – – The Adirondack Almanack

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Stewarts Landing: Long dammed but still special – – The Adirondack Almanack

With the water down for the winter, it’s easy to imagine the channel as the Mohawks of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy once saw it. Though the current dam on Stewarts Landing determines the summer level of the water, the top of the upstream rapids appearing when the level goes down is the determining factor for the winter level. This waterway was suitable for canoeing long before any dams were constructed.

What we call Stewarts Landing is the 2 mile stretch of flat water carrying the outflow of Canada and Lily Lakes to a concrete dam. Once called Fish Creek, the stream through and below Stewarts Landing is currently known as Sprite Creek. Below the dam, the unnavigable rocky stream flows into East Canada Creek, which joins the Mohawk and then Hudson Rivers.

I wonder how much of the spike in demand and electricity shortage down south is due the common air-source heat pumps having to kick on their electric pre-heaters due to extreme cold conditions (at least for the south)

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I wonder how much of the spike in demand and electricity shortage down south is due the common air-source heat pumps having to kick on their electric pre-heaters due to extreme cold conditions (at least for the south). In the south with warmer temperatures being the norm, they rely on heat pumps to pump heat out of buildings in the winter (air conditioning), and pump heat into buildings during the winter. Many large buildings, especially down south, use air conditioners with reversing valves, that allows them to pump heat into buildings, by compressing the heat in outdoors air.

Such systems work well, and are very energy efficient in moderate temperatures. You can typically compress enough heat out of 35 or 40 degree air to keep a building a comfortable 70 or 75 degrees. But the problem is when the air temperature drops below 35 degrees — there is simply not enough heat in air for compressor to work. Such air-source heat pumps then contain electrical resistance pre-heaters, similar to electric space heaters that a lot of people have. The pre-heaters are activated to heat the air when it’s cold to compress it out of outdoors air. While resistance heaters release all of the heat in electricity, power plants are lossy and 55-70% of all heat in fuel is discarded and not turned into energy. So when they fire up the electric heat, it’s quite lossy.

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Anyone can easily search for ArcGIS servers.

Assume you want to know if St. Louis County Minnesota (County seat is Duluth) has a public-facing ArcGIS server. First, find the county website. Note that the website address includes “stlouiscountymn”. Second, do a Google search on: stlouiscountymn “rest/services”.  Include the quotes in your search.

If this county has a GIS server then you will likely see search hits to various places within the table of contents. Open any table of contents page and then in the upper left corner click on “Home”. You now will see the ‘top’ of the table of contents for this ArcGIS server and the browser address bar will display an address that ends in “/rest/services”.

Of course at the county and city level you could simply call or email the GIS staff and ask. Here is one way to phrase the question: “Do you have a public-facing ArcGIS server and, if so, what  is the rest service endpoint?”

Sometimes you might see two server addresses that appear identical except one of them says “arcgis” and the other says “ArcGIS”. Technically these are different internet addresses and these two servers may or may not contain the same information.

Tip: If you are interested in a topic instead of a state/county/city then try a Google search like this example: “climate change” “rest/services”. Include keywords for your topic and always include rest/services in quotes. Many of the hits that are returned will point you to ArcGIS layers.

Some useful information from Joseph Elfelt’s amazing List of ARC GIS Servers.