Monday 16 August 2021

Visualization and analyis of parallel topographic profiles in Jupyter

A new version (5.0.1) of pygsf adds tools for the creation and analysis of parallel profiles, for instance directly into a Jupyter notebook.

What is pygsf? It's a Python module devoted to the processing of topographic and geological data.

With the new tools, multiple profiles can be plotted, as well as their statistical properties: for instance the range of the profiles, their minimum, maximum and mean traces. The profiles can also be exported as a line shapefile, in order to visualize them in a GIS software (e.g. QGIS), or exported as an animated gif. 

The images below represent a brief tour of the methods available.

First is a simple plot of a single topographic profile.

We can create multiple parallel profiles, for instance 5 parallel profiles produced from the base profile using a user-provided normal offset:

The multiple profiles can be plotted into a single graph:

 


They can be composed into an animation (quite slow to play, I admit):

The minimum and the maximum of the profiles along the trace can be plotted in a single profile:

and also the range (maximum - minimum) calculated and plotted:

Last showed method  is the possibility to save the multiple profiles into a new line shapefile, that can be loaded for instance in QGIS to display the locations of the topographic sections created (the Mt. Alpi zone in the Lucania Southern Apennines, Italy):

 
 
 
The code repository is at:
 
A quite detailed notebook describing how to reproduce the processing shown here is available at:
(note: unfortunately the embedded gif results broken)