HORAYZON v1.2: an efficient and flexible ray-tracing algorithm to compute horizon and sky view factor

Abstract

Abstract. Terrain parameters like topographic horizon and sky view factor (SVF) are used in numerous fields and applications. In atmospheric and climate modelling, such parameters are utilised to parameterise the effect of terrain geometry on radiation exchanges between the surface and the atmosphere. Ideally, these parameters are derived from a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) because inferring them from coarser elevation data induces a smoothing effect. Computing topographic horizon with conventional algorithms, however, is slow because large amounts of non-local terrain data have to be processed. We propose a new and more efficient method, which is based on a high-performance ray-tracing library. The new algorithm can speed up horizon calculation by 2 orders of magnitude relative to a conventional approach. By applying terrain simplification to remote topography, the ray-tracing-based algorithm can also be applied with very high-resolution (<5 m) DEM data, which would otherwise induce an excessive memory footprint. The topographic horizon algorithm is accompanied by an SVF algorithm, which was verified to work accurately for all terrain – even very steep and complex terrain. We compare the computational performance and accuracy of the new horizon algorithm with two reference methods from the literature and illustrate its benefits. Finally, we illustrate how sub-grid SVF values can be efficiently computed with the newly derived horizon algorithm for a wide range of target grid resolutions (1–25 km).