ViewSHED is an open-source API for computing the visible area given a location and elevation. It was built to aid in the construction of mesh networks and for use by amateur radio. The API currently supports GeoJSON and an HTML interface.
Calculating viewshed is not particularly hard but wrangling together the data and learning an appropriate GIS tool can be challenging. ViewSHED has an easy to use web interface and uses accurate (90 meter) global elevation data making calculating viewshed easy.
Calculates the the viewshed given a location and elevation.
curl http://viewshed.mod64.net/api/v1/viewshed/{format}?lng={longitude}&lat={latitude}&altitude={altitude}&radius={radius}| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| format | The return type. Currently geojson and html are supported. If html is specified a map will be rendered, visualizing the viewshed |
| longitude | longitude of location |
| latitude | latitude of location |
| altitude | altitude of location/tower in meters above ground level |
| radius | radius of viewshed calculation in meters |
| abs_altitude | if specified aka abs_altitude=1 altitude will be relative to sea level rather than ground level |
Returns the elevation of the ground at a given location.
curl http://viewshed.mod64.net/api/v1/elevation/{format}?lng={longitude}&lat={latitude}Returns the elevation and lat/lng of the highest point in a given radius.
curl http://viewshed.mod64.net/api/v1/topofhill/{format}?lng={longitude}&lat={latitude}&radius=100| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| format | The return type. Currently geojson and html are supported. If html is specified a map will be rendered, visualizing the elevation |
| longitude | longitude of location |
| latitude | latitude of location |
First, try the publicly hosted version and ensure it does what you want. The elevation data is approx. 30G and takes a while to download. Assuming you still wish to deploy your own server:
- Install docker.
- Download the ~30GB of data by running
./download-data.sh. This will probably take a while. - Run the container with
docker run -it --rm -p 8080:8080 -v "$(pwd)/tiles.leveldb:/usr/local/viewshed/data/tiles.leveldb" viewshed:latest
The calculations are currently based on SRTM Digital Elevation Database v4.1. Calculations are accurate worldwide to approx. 90m.