wind.shelter: Wind Shelter Index

In RSAGA: SAGA Geoprocessing and Terrain Analysis

Wind Shelter Index

Description

wind.shelter is a function to be used with focal.function() to calculate a topographic wind shelter index from a digital elevation model, which is a proxy for snow accumulation on the lee side of topographic obstacles. wind.shelter.prep performs some preparatory calculations to speed up repeated calls to wind.shelter.

Usage

wind.shelter(x, prob = NULL, control)

wind.shelter.prep(radius, direction, tolerance, cellsize = 90)

Arguments

x	square matrix of elevation data
prob	numeric: quantile of slope values to be used in computing the wind shelter index; if NULL, use max (equivalent to prob=1)
control	required argument: the result of a call to wind.shelter.prep
radius	radius (>1) of circle segment to be used (number of grid cells, not necessarily an integer)
direction	wind direction: direction from which the wind originates; North = 0 = 2*pi, clockwise angles.
tolerance	directional tolerance
cellsize	grid cellsize

Details

wind.shelter implements a wind shelter index used by Plattner et al. (2004) for modeling snow accumulation patterns on a glacier in the Austrian Alps. It is a modified version of the algorithm of Winstral et al. (2002). The wind shelter index of Plattner et al. (2004) is defined as:

Shelter index(S) = arctan( max( (z(x0)-z(x)) / |x0-x| : x in S ) ),

where S = S(x0,a,da,d) is the set of grid nodes within a distance <=d from x0, only considering grid nodes in directions between a-da and a+da from x0.

The present implementation generalizes this index by replacing max by the quantile function; the max function is used if prob=NULL, and the same result is obtained for prob=1 using the quantile function.

Value

The function wind.shelter returns the wind shelter index as described above if a numeric matrix x is provided. If it is missing, it returns the character string "windshelter".

wind.shelter.prep returns a list with components mask and dist. Both are square matrices with 2*(ceiling(radius)+1) columns and rows:

mask	indicates which grid cell in the moving window is within the specified circle segment (value FALSE) or not (TRUE)
dist	the precomputed distances of a grid cell to the center of the moving window, in map units

Note

The wind shelter index only makes sense if elevation is measured in the same units as the horizontal map units used for the cellsize argument (i.e. usually meters).

wind.shelter and wind.shelter.prep do not restrict the calculation to a circular area; this is done by focal.function() when used in combination with that function (assuming search.mode="circle").

Note that the present definition of the wind shelter index returns negative values for surfaces that are completely exposed toward the specified direction. This may make sense if interpreted as a "wind exposure index", or it might be appropriate to set negative wind shelter values to 0.

Author(s)

Alexander Brenning

References

Plattner, C., Braun, L.N., Brenning, A. (2004): Spatial variability of snow accumulation on Vernagtferner, Austrian Alps, in winter 2003/2004. Zeitschrift fuer Gletscherkunde und Glazialgeologie, 39: 43-57.

Winstral, A., Elder, K., Davis, R.E. (2002): Spatial snow modeling of wind-redistributed snow using terrain-based parameters. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 3: 524-538.

See Also

focal.function(), quantile()

Examples

# Settings used by Plattner et al. (2004):
ctrl = wind.shelter.prep(6,-pi/4,pi/12,10)
## Not run: focal.function("dem.asc",fun=wind.shelter,control=ctrl,
    radius=6,search.mode="circle")
## End(Not run)

RSAGA documentation built on Dec. 10, 2022, 1:12 a.m.