Introduction

Raster analysis works similar to vector analysis but the spatial relation is determined by the position of the raster cell. Most of our raster data is collected through diverse remote sensing techniques. In this chapter, the goals are quite simple and focused on working with and around a digital elevation model (DEM). The DEM we are using is from Whistler, BC, Canada, home to the 2010 Winter Olympics. Our DEM is in the form of the USGS ASCII CDED (.dem) format. The DEM is our source data that is used to derive several new raster datasets. As with other chapters, we will leverage Python as our glue to run scripts to enable a processing pipeline for raster data. The visualization of our data will play out with matplotlib along with the QGIS desktop GIS.