About surface analysis
Surfaces are representations of continuous phenomena, such as elevation, density, or distance. Surfaces can be stored as a feature dataset containing isolines of constant value, such as elevation contours, and as a raster, triangulated irregular network (TIN), and terrain dataset. ArcGIS contains many tools to create and analyze surfaces.
Surface tools are used to do the following:
- Create continuous surface representations from point observations, such as elevation, temperature, or pollution concentrations.
- Calculate the direction and angle of the steepest descent (aspect and slope) of a surface.
- Create watersheds and stream networks.
- Calculate viewsheds and line of sight analysis.
- Calculate volume differences between surfaces.
- Create hillshade maps to highlight relief in your maps.
Surface analysis using geoprocessing
There are many geoprocessing tools available for performing surface analysis. These tools are grouped according to the type of data they operate on and the task they perform. See the following:
Surface analysis using ArcObjects
Although, in general, geoprocessing tools should be used for surface analysis (especially when working with raster datasets), there are times when ArcObjects can be used for processing TIN and terrain surfaces. Some examples of these can be found in the following topics: