GISmatters specializes in quantitative location analysis for business, communications, municipal, environmental, medical, safety, and academic applications. We apply a rich set of GIS and geostatistical methodologies and tools to answer your questions about the spatial relationships among the data crucial to your enterprise.

Visibility

Networks

Weighting

Location Analysis: Visibility

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GIS tools and data let you analyze a wide range of problems involving the "visibility" of one or more points from one or more places in a region. This general type of problem arises in many applications, from designing wireless communications networks, to analyzing potential solar energy systems, to evaluating sites for new residential, commercial, or industrial development.

The example here shows the visibility pattern of a proposed development of 40 homes on the north flank of Mt Holyoke in western Massachusetts. The first image is a "bare earth" model, with the color indicating how many of the new homes would see - and be seen from - the surrounding areas (magenta through red; black dots are house sites). The second image includes the effects of forest, removing forested areas (green) and their "visibility shadows" from the result by assuming a fixed forest height in all forested areas. These two results represent end-member solutions to the visibility problem - the true visibility pattern would lie somewhere between these two, and could be determined more accurately with more detailed modeling of forest vegetation, existing buildings, other viewshed obstructions, and the siting of the individual houses.