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.
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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
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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:
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