Chapter 7. Python and Elevation Data
Elevation data is one of the most fascinating types of geospatial data. It represents many different types of data sources and formats. Elevation data can display properties of both vector and raster data resulting in unique data products. Elevation data can serve the following purposes:
- Terrain visualization
- Land cover classification
- Hydrology modelling
- Transportation routing
- Feature Extraction
You can't perform all of these options with both raster and vector data but because elevation data is three dimensional, containing x, y, and z coordinates, you can often get more out of these data than any other type.
In this chapter, we're going to learn to read and write elevation data in both raster and vector point formats. We'll also create some derivative products. The topics we'll cover are:
- ASCII Grid elevation data files
- Shaded-relief images
- Elevation contours
- Gridding LIDAR data
- Creating a 3D mesh
