HORAYZON v1.1: An efficient and flexible ray-tracing algorithm to compute horizon and sky view factor

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Abstract
Terrain parameters like topographic horizon and sky view factor (SVF) are used in numerous fields and applications. In atmospheric and climate modelling, such parameters are utilized to parameterise the effect of terrain geometry on radiation exchanges between the surface and the atmosphere. Ideally, these parameters are derived from a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM), because inferring them from coarser elevation data induces a smoothing effect. Computing topographic horizon with conventional algorithms is however slow, because large amounts of non-local terrain data have to be processes. We propose a new and more efficient method, which is based on a high-performance ray tracing library. By applying terrain simplification to remote topography, this allows the application of the new algorithms also with very high-resolution (< 5 m) DEM data, which otherwise would induce an excessive memory footprint. The topographic horizon algorithm is accompanied by a SVF algorithm, which was verified to work accurately for all terrain – even very steep and complex one. We compare the computational performance and accuracy of the new horizon algorithm with two reference methods from literature and illustrate its benefits. Finally, we illustrate how sub-grid SVF values can be efficiently computed with the newly derived horizon algorithm for a wide range of target grid resolutions (1–25 km).
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  • Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH+03 19-2)

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