Lab 4 - Visibility Analysis

This week's lab consisted of 4 parts, each looking at different tools, methods, and applications for visibility analysis. In Part A I created a viewshed based off a DEM and analyzing summit points. This was by far the most challenging part for me as viewshed and observer point attribute results were difficult to wrap my head around. After much reading and discussion posts, I think I have a better handle on what the different cell values for each mean, who can see who in them, and how to work with raster cell data and feature class points. We'll see if I really do understand it when I get my lab back from grading!
In Part B, I created a visibility map using a road network as the observer points on an elevation raster for Yellowstone National Park. This section was fairly straightforward and enjoyable as I am familiar with Yellowstone and had fun looking at the roads, elevation and slope, and visibility results on the map and in my memory.
Part C was a little tricky with a line of sight (LOS) analysis using oath imagery to look at camera surveillance placement and visibility in Boston for a race finish line. The challenging part was understanding how to edit in camera points and set different offsets and viewing angles for each, which was fine once I had the correct fields in my attribute table. Took a little tweaking but I think I ended up with decent placement, offset, and angles to appropriately cover the finish line point. See screenshot for results.
Part D, the final section was to different type of line of sight analysis. This included creating a line of sight between two summits and then one summit to multiple targets, looking at obstructions, visible and non-visible segments of an LOS, and a constructed LOS shapefile of all lines of sight between all summits.
Visibility analysis is interesting and easy to see the variety of applications it is useful for, however, it was definitely a challenging lab!

Line of sight analysis denotes which areas of an urban race finish line are covered by one, two, or three cameras.