INTERACTIVE WEB MAP OF MARCELLUS AND UTICA SHALE SHOWING THICKNESS AND DEPTH WITHIN THE STATE OF PA

The objective of this capstone project is to develop an interactive web map that will display the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale thickness and depth model within the State of Pennsylvania. Both Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale have now become economically attractive resources in the State of PA. They are predicted to boost the economy of the commonwealth for the coming ten years. In this project I will be emphasizing on the methodology that is applied to complete the project. The methodology has two important phases: geo-statistical analysis and GIS web development.

1,795 Marcellus Shale well-heads and 71 Utica Shale well-heads are used to serve as control stations or data points around which the geostatistical interpolation will be used. In order to create the models I have picked kriging analysis method for the Marcellus Shale and Natural Neighbor for the Utica Shale to be the suitable approach. Kriging method involves semi-variogram and other options that will enable more accurate representation by taking the standard error into account.

Server side programming language is applied to add the interpolated layers (polygons) and the data point layers (points) in the Google API web map. MySQL database that is administered by phpMyAdmin and that allows ODBC connection to Access database is applied in the process. XML file transferring technology is used in the web-publishing. Client based scripting languages like Java script and HTML are also partially used in the web development. Clickable sidebars will be placed below the maps to refer and identify each representation of the map features and attributes in a popping up information window.