Terrain Visualization with MicroDEM

I chose to do this project on a portion of Humphrey's Peak, which is one of the tallest mountains in central Arizona. Humphrey's Peak have a rocky terrain with treeline around 11,400 feet. It is one of the oldest extinct volcanic peak. Since the area that this project was based on have mainly a rocky terrain with no vegetation or water bodies, all of the map that were created would also have a rocky terrain, which is helpful in this application because we are interested in the elevation. The latitude and longitude extension of this terrain is 35.3920015° N (Northern Coordinate),   35.2761246° N (Southern Coordinate), 111.747437W° (Western Coordinate), and 111.592094° W (Eastern Coordinate). The program that was used to create this project was MicroDEM. For this project, I created 5 maps for this region.

The first map that was created was a Hill Shaded Map that was created of the region. I created this map from the ASTER DEM of the United States. The color scheme is gray with a vertical exaggeration of 2; sun azimuth at 65° NE and sun elevation at 43°. Below is a depiction of what the Hill Shaded Map looks like.

The second map that was created was the Elevation Map. By using the display parameters options, I was able to set the display option to terrain color scale with 5 contrasting colors and no stretching. My elevation map looks like the following.

  
The third map that was created was an overlay of the two previous maps. By showing the grays scale reflectance of my hillshaded map on top of my elevation map, I was able to create a combination showing of both of the above maps. The attribute of the map below would be a combination of the two above it.

 

The fourth map created for this project was a Contour Map. Again, by using the display parameters option, I was able to create a contour map with contour intervals of 50 meters, specified contour colors with red contour lines, contour line width of 1, and index contour width of 4. Each lines of contour are labeled with Font 12 Arial. I then added the Hill Shaded Map, which already have all of its attribute described above, as an overlay by using the terrain shading option in MicroDEM. The final result is depicted below.

The final map in this project would be the Line of Sight Map, which is basically the sketching of a line of sight, showing what an observer would see if he/she is standing on a particular point looking in a certain direction, on the Hill Shaded Map (again, all of its attributes are already defined above in the description of the Hill Shaded Map). My line of sight starting point is at 35.3556480° N    111.703053°W, and my ending point is at 35.3338359°N    111.626769°W. As shown below, the green line shows the portion of the landscape that an observer would see if he/she maintains a straight line of sight all the way across the landscape from the starting point to the ending point, and the red shows portions that the observer wouldn't be able to see at all. The plot of the Line of Sight Map depicts this very well.