Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

Geospatial Analysis is used in almost every field you can think of from medicine, to defense, to farming. This book will guide you gently into this exciting and complex field. It walks you through the building blocks of geospatial analysis and how to apply them to influence decision making using the latest Python software. Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, 2nd Edition uses the expressive and powerful Python 3 programming language to guide you through geographic information systems, remote sensing, topography, and more, while providing a framework for you to approach geospatial analysis effectively, but on your own terms. We start by giving you a little background on the field, and a survey of the techniques and technology used. We then split the field into its component specialty areas: GIS, remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modeling, and real-time data. This book will teach you everything you need to know about, Geospatial Analysis from using a particular software package or API to using generic algorithms that can be applied. This book focuses on pure Python whenever possible to minimize compiling platform-dependent binaries, so that you don’t become bogged down in just getting ready to do analysis. This book will round out your technical library through handy recipes that will give you a good understanding of a field that supplements many a modern day human endeavors.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

ASCII Grid files


For most of this chapter, we'll use ASCII Grid files or ASCIIGRID. These files are a type of raster data usually associated with elevation data. This grid format stores data as text in equal-sized square rows and columns with a simple header. Each cell in a row/column stores a single numeric value, which can represent some feature of terrain, such as elevation, slope, or flow direction. The simplicity makes it an easy-to-use, platform-independent raster format. This format is described in the ASCII Grids section in Chapter 2, Geospatial Data.

Throughout the book, we've relied on GDAL and, to some extent, PIL to read and write geospatial raster data including the gdal_array module to load raster data in the NumPy arrays. ASCI Grid allows us to read and write rasters using only Python or even NumPy because it is simple, plain text.

Tip

As a reminder, some elevation datasets use image formats to store elevation data. Most image formats only support 8-bit values ranging between...