Elevation data is one of the most fascinating types of geospatial data. It represents many different types of data sources and formats. It can display properties of both vector and raster data, resulting in unique data products. Elevation data can be used for terrain visualization, land cover classification, hydrology modeling, transportation routing, feature extraction, and many other purposes.
You can't perform all of these options with both raster and vector data, but since elevation data is three-dimensional, due to containing x, y, and z coordinates, you can often get more out of this data than any other type.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Using ASCII Grid elevation data files for simple elevation processing
- Creating shaded relief images
- Creating elevation contours
- Gridding the LIDAR data
- Creating a 3D mesh
In this chapter...
