GIS Visualization

Below are two ways of displaying elevation data in a GIS.  The one on top shows tower locations over a display of the Digital Elevation Model using a color ramp.  The second one shows tower locations over a hillshaded model of the DEM.  Hillshading is a GIS function that uses a DEM as input and returns a pseudo-3D image.  The majority of the towers are located on mountain ridges, and this can be seen in both images, but probably more quickly on the hillshaded image.  However, there is no way to know how high those ridges are on the hillshaded image because the values returned in the shading process detail light reflectance, not elevation.  With the color ramp DEM, each color represents a range of elevations, thus giving the viewer some idea of the heights of the towers.

Back to GIS at CWT