Compute surface area from elevation data

It is often said that if Wales was flattened out it would have an area bigger than England. This function computes the surface area for a raster with elevation values, taking into account the sloping nature of the surface.

Usage

# S4 method for class 'SpatRaster'
surfArea(x, filename="", ...)

Arguments

x

SpatRaster with elevation values. Currently the raster CRS must be planar and have the same distance units (e.g. m) as the elevation values

filename

character. Output filename

...

additional arguments for writing files as in writeRaster

Value

SpatRaster

References

Jenness, Jeff S., 2004. Calculating Landscape Surface Area from Digital Elevation Models. Wildlife Society Bulletin 32(3): 829-839

Author

Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson@lancaster.ac.uk>

Examples

v <- rast(volcano, crs="local")
x <- terra::surfArea(v)