In the Southwestern United States, significant deposits of Cretaceous coal are concentrated in a coherent physiographic and geologic province known as the Colorado Plateau, located within a 165,000-square-mile area of the States of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. The Colorado Plateau is one of five coal-producing areas that are being studied as part of the National Coal Resource Assessment Project. This CD-ROM set contains a geologic assessment of coal deposits of the Colorado Plateau region and new resource estimates for selected assessment units within the Colorado Plateau. Original resource estimates (in-place resources before production) for the 12 priority assessment units of the Colorado Plateau exceed one half trillion short tons of coal in beds greater than 1 ft thick and under less than 6,000 ft of overburden. The coal is high quality and low sulfur, and a portion of these resources will provide future energy production for the Nation. The geologic interpretations and digital data presented in this CD-ROM set provide industry geologists, land-use planners, Congress, and the public with comprehensive information on the location, distribution, and quality of these coal resources.
In order to read files on disc 1, the user must install Acrobat Reader 4.0 or later on their system. Acrobat Reader installers for many operating systems are included on disc 1 in the Acrobat Reader Installers folder.
Disc 1, in PDF (Portable Document Format), contains results of the assessment in summary and (or) technical reports for 12 priority coal assessment units in the Colorado Plateau. Detailed cross sections and maps of coal distribution, coal quality, structure, and overburden were produced for each assessment unit from digital stratigraphic and geographic databases newly created during this study. Also included are an executive summary; an introduction to the coal geology of the Colorado Plateau; and reports on coal ownership, methodology, economic evaluation, and coal-bed methane potential.
Disc 1 also contains an ArcView Data Publisher Project, which is an interactive GIS (Geographic Information System) of digital data collected during the assessment. The disc contains ArcView shapefiles with views of coal ownership, coal production, coal quality, and geology for the Colorado Plateau and views of structure, coal thickness, and overburden thickness for selected coal basins. ArcView Data Publisher software is provided, but requires a Windows operating system for use (see System Requirements). The ArcView Data Publisher allows users to access, analyze, and query the data and generate derivative digital products. Copies of the digital products and data can be downloaded.
Disc 2 contains stratigraphic databases for seven of the priority coal assessment areas. Information in the databases includes point location (latitude and longitude), depths to tops of key formations, and depths to tops of coal intervals. The databases are appendixes to reports included as PDF's on disc 1. They include data for the following areas: Danforth Hills coal field (chap. M, Appendix 1), the Lower White River coal field (chap. N, Appendix 1), Southern Piceance Basin (chap. O, Appendix 5), Yampa coal field (chap. P, Appendix 8), San Juan Basin (chap. Q, Appendix 2), Southern Wasatch Plateau (chap. S, Appendix 1), and Kaiparowits Plateau (chap. I, Appendix 5). The databases are stored in ASCII, DBF, and Excel formats.
Disc 2 also contains an ArcView project identical to the ArcView Data Publisher Project on disc 1 except that it retains some of the functionality that is disabled in the ArcView Data Publisher program. This ArcView project can be opened by anyone having ArcView 3.1 for Windows. UNIX users with ArcView 3.1 can also access the project file, cpca.apr, but some of the links that open Acrobat PDF's may not execute. Macintosh users with ArcView 2.1 can access the vector and raster files stored in the Colorado Plateau Data Library to create their own ArcView project. The Colorado Plateau library provides vector data in three formats: ArcView shapefiles (.shp), ARC/INFO coverages, and ARC/INFO EXPORT files (.e00). The raster data are in TIFF image files.
System Requirements
Supported systems and minimum requirements to use the data with the software provided are:
Disc 1-PDF's-and Disc 2-Stratigraphic Databases
Personal computer, 200-MHz Pentium processor or greater, Windows 95 or higher, or Windows NT 4.0 or higher operating system, at least 16 MB application RAM, VGA color graphics system.
Macintosh computer with 68020 (Macintosh II series) or greater processor. MacOS 7.0 or later, 24 MB RAM, and 20 MB hard-disk space.
Sun SPARCstation, SunOS 4.1.3 or later, or Solaris 2.3, or later, OpenWindows (3.0 or later), Motif (1.2.3 or later), OpenLook version 3.0 or Common Desktop Environment (CDE) 1.0, 12 MB of available hard-disk space, 32 MB RAM.
Silicon Graphics workstation, IRIX 5.3 or later, 12 MB of available hard-disk space, 32 MB of RAM.
IBM RS/6000 workstation, AIX(R) 4.1 or later operation system CDE 1.0 or Motif window manager, 12 MB of available hard-disk space, 32 MB RAM.
Disc 1 and Disc 2-ArcView Projects
Intel-x86-based personal computer (Pentium or Pentium Pro recommended), 200-MHz Pentium processor or greater (400 MHz recommended), Windows 95 or higher, or Windows NT 4.0 or higher Operating System, at least 24 MB application RAM (32 MB recommended), 17 MB virtual memory, 16-bit color depth or 65,536 colors, and 1,024 ┤ 768 pixels.
Getting Started
Disc 1
Presentations
1. Obtain and install Acrobat Reader 4.0 or later on your hard drive if not already installed.
2. At the root directory of disc 1, open the folder OPEN_FIRST and launch the file TitlePage_TOC.pdf to access the volume title page. The volume table of contents will appear after clicking the "click to continue" button. The ReadMe file is accessible from a button on the first page of the volume table of contents; lettered chapters are also accessed from the volume table of contents. Headings, illustrations, and tables within a chapter are accessed from that chapter's table of contents or from bookmarks or thumbnails in Acrobat Reader. Icons on the title page and the last page of each chapter-as well as on the first and last page of this ReadMe file-return the reader to the disc 1 volume table of contents.
ArcView Data Publisher (AVDP) Project
1. Click on "Setup.exe" in the ArcView_Data_Pub folder (see System Requirements for using software). This will bring up the setup screen for ArcView Data Publisher. Follow on-screen directions. For a detailed explanation of setup options see Biewick and Mercier (chap. D, p. D12, disc 1, this CD-ROM).
2. Once the software is installed, launch ArcView Data Publisher by clicking on "Colorado Plateau ArcView Project" in the Windows Programs menu.
Disc 2
Stratigraphic Databases
1. Launch a database software program of choice (e.g., Excel) and locate a file within the "Stratigraphic_Databases" folder.
ArcView Project
1. Launch ArcView 3.1 for Windows and locate cpca.apr, the Colorado Plateau ArcView Project. Users with ArcView 3.1 for UNIX can open the project, but they may have functionality issues. Users with ArcView 2.1 for Macintosh can create their own project by accessing the shape files, coverages, and TIFF images on disc 2.
