Lidar viewsheds

I've been spending a lot of time looking at bare-earth DTMs recently, but this is what leaving in the trees and buildings can do for you. Viewshed analysis of a potential development site showing how much screening the trees, buildings and hedgerows provide. If it's pure black, you can't see any part of the site. Presented here as much for the aesthetic effect (though it might not seem quite so aesthetic if that was your back garden).

Cawthorn Camps, North Yorkshire

Extracted from the newly released EA lidar dataset. Cawthorn camps in North Yorkshire. Something (above) using the Relief Visualization Toolbox and (below) 3D modelling via SAGA.

York lidar

The Historic Towns Atlas volume for York would have liked to incorporate a lidar plan, but have unfortunately gone to press too soon. Now that the Environment Agency's restrictive licensing arrangements have given way to an Open Data release they could have used it as they saw fit. Still, here is an image knocked up from the 50cm lidar coverage.

Lidar for free!

As of the beginning of this month all of the Environment Agency Lidar data for England has been released as open data. It can be accessed through a new portal. Some have complained of problems, and it can be rather slow loading the background mapping, but I've been able to get my hands on lots of interesting stuff already.

Roman temporary camps north and south of Hadrian's Wall just east of Aesica

The data is released under Open Government licence which allows commercial use, so it's all there to play with as you see fit. Sadly, in the process we have lost Wales which devolves elsewhere (though through some odd [and yet to be repeated] glitch I managed to download a chunk of the Lleyn peninsula just the other day, so the data seems to be there - hopefully someone will sign it off for release before too long).