An Interactive Slope and Aspect Map

I was recently in awe of the fantastic work of Mapzen and their custom terrain maps. If you have some time, read the Mapping Mountains blog post here.  I figured there had to be a way to build versions of these custom maps that showed both the Cyan / Magenta / Yellow and Navy / Orange / Yellow slope and aspect maps available as prints on our website.  Following Mapzen's lead, I used GIMP to create spheremaps for both the CMY and NOY versions:

cmy gradient noy gradient

Sample code can be downloaded from Mapzen's terrain demos Github page here.

I was able to switch out my custom spheremaps with their spheremaps, and after a little trial and error, the results were better than I expected.

If you would like me to build a print-ready map of a custom area, you can click on "View Full Map" for either of the maps below, then navigate to your preferred location and zoom level, then send the resulting URL to slopeandaspect@gmail.com, and I will get a high-resolution map poster ready for you.  Thanks, and have fun!

View Full Map  >>

View Full Map  >>

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1 comment

These are fantastic! So you were using sphere maps to generate your original work? Can you talk at all about the tools you used? I’m approaching all of this from a 3D background, and I’ve been very curious to know where that world overlaps with GIS/cartography… I’ve been surprised how little they seem to have interacted so far, as many of the problems seem quite similar to me. Thanks again for sharing these!

Peter Richardson

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