ABSTRACT
New advanced technologies have been developed to enable researchers to explore real-world 3D geospatial information. One of the major forms of 3D data is surface data. This chapter introduces the fundamentals of surface data and related processing algorithms. A surface is a representation of geographic features that can be considered as a Z value for each location defined by X, Y coordinates. The chapter introduces fundamentals of 3D surface data and the related basic processing algorithms and demonstrates how to program them in ArcGIS using Arcpy. It explains surface data structure and essential representations of surface data, that is, discrete data or continuous surface data. The chapter discusses the creation of two types of continuous surface data: Grid and TIN, and the conversion between them. It reviews surface data analysis, including the calculation of elevation, slope, aspect, and flow direction. It provides hands-on experience with arcpy, conducting conversion among DEM, TIN, and contours, and calculating slope, aspect, and flow direction.
