What does slope, aspect and elevation indicate

Hello All,

I am new at the GIS terminology. I was looking for spatial data and
tumbled on the site below.

http://kdd.ics.uci.edu/databases/covertype/covertype.data.html

What does the slope, aspect and elevation mean? Can these be converted
into latitude and longitude or flat points (x,y) with any origin.

Thanks for your help

-BG

Hello all,

Sorry if this appears as a duplicate message.
My question is given slope(in degrees), aspect (azimuth) how to convert
the data into x, y coordinates (or lat,long).

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.gis/browse_frm/thread/d45164804a94b34e/3744c82ff4e1355e?q=slope+elevation+aspect&rnum=4&hl=en#3744c82ff4e1355e
one way this can be done is x = s*sin(A), y = s*cos(A)

Does this hold in all cases?

It is indicated, that the data I was referring to in my previous post
is in 30 x 30 meter cells. what does this mean? Does the metres and
cells change the slope and aspect calculations.

Finally, is there any matlab function to make above calculations.

I would appreciate any help I can get with any or all of my questions
above.

Cheers,
-bg

I'm pretty sure the dataset on that website is a multivarite raster that
describes various attributes
of the terrain as evenly-spaced values (30 meters apart, hence a cell-size
of 30 m). The
attributes include Elevation, Aspect, Slope, etc. Aspect would be the
horizontal
direction in which the terrain slopes, and Slope would be the vertical
slope-angle. The data
is arranged as a series of sets of 54 attribute values. Each value is
separated by a comma.
Each set of 54 values applies to the same location. The next set of 54
values applies to a location 30 m to the right from the first location, etc.
until you get to the right-most location, then it starts a new row 30 m
south of the first one.

You could extract a raster of a single attribute simply by grabbing each
n-th value from each line,
where n is the location of that attribute in the list of 54 attributes.

In order to use this data, you'd need to know two things:
How many rows and columns are there?
What is the x,y location of the first site?
I didn't see that information in a quick glance at the website, but maybe
it's there somewhere.

I hope that helps.

Robert van Waasbergen
robertvw@aedsnet.com


http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.gis/browse_frm/thread/d45164804a94b34e/3744c82ff4e1355e?q=slope+elevation+aspect&rnum=4&hl=en#3744c82ff4e1355e