Go North – Alaska Gets (Partial) Elevation Data

The USGS has been adding portions of Alaska to the National Elevation Dataset (NED), and although coverage isn’t anywhere near complete, I finally decided it was time to pull the trigger on an initial buildout of elevation data for Alaska.

current coverage footprint

The buildout includes:

• Normal and enhanced relief
• 40′ contours
• Elevation data
• DEM shading, viewsheds and sunlight analysis
• View from here
• Fixed and gradient slope shading

Denali looks kind of mellow until you turn on slope angle shading, at which point the West Buttress route becomes a little more obvious.

My viewshed and sunlight layers, as well as the view from here feature, assume that nothing is higher than about 14k, as a performance optimization feature.  So for the moment, the view of Denali from Hunter looks a little messed up:

I still don’t have canopy and or land coverage data for Alaska or Hawaii, so while I can display terrain stats, those fields are blank: