Week 5: Terrain Analysis

Presentation Slides

• Tuesday — Elevation Data and LiDAR — What an elevation surface is, how LiDAR measures one, and where to download a DEM — the National Map and 3DEP, SRTM, ASTER GDEM and ALOS, and what cell size costs you.
• Thursday — Terrain Analysis — What you compute from a DEM: shaded relief, contours, slope, aspect and curvature from local neighborhoods, plus viewsheds from line of sight.

Press F for fullscreen and P for presenter view with speaker notes.

In-Class Practice

• Terrain Analysis, Slope (Excel) (graded, 5 points) — done in class Tuesday; upload the workbook by 9:30 am, fifteen minutes after class.

Self-check quizzes — not graded; open them on a phone or laptop as often as you like:

• Surfaces and Returns — Five questions on where an elevation surface comes from: how LiDAR measures one, which surface you need, and what cell size costs you.
• Slope, Aspect, Viewshed — Six questions on what you get out of a DEM: what contours and hillshade show, aspect as an azimuth, why the slope method matters, what a viewshed answers, and how to count what a hike can see.

Lab Assignment

Lab 4 — Cell Phone Tower Placement

Due Saturday at 11:59 pm as one PDF report on Learning Suite — 50 points.

Reading Quiz

Read Chapter 11 of GIS Fundamentals, 7th edition (Bolstad).

Quiz 5 — Terrain Analysis on Learning Suite: open book, done independently. Due Saturday at 11:59 pm — 20 points.

Note

If you see a discrepancy between Learning Suite and this page, please let me know so I can rectify it.