Please help me with something potentially important.  The documentation for 
gdaldem slope says “If the horizontal unit of the source DEM is degrees (e.g 
Lat/Long WGS84 projection), you can use scale=111120 if the vertical units are 
meters” but I don’t think this works very far away from the equator.  I think 
the algorithm assumes that the north-south units are the same as the east-west 
units, whereas obviously away from the equator degrees of longitude become a 
lot shorter.

I’m looking at my attempt at avalanche slope mapping, and seem to see east-west 
slopes showing up with higher slopes than north-south slopes with identically 
spaced contour intervals.

Am I right?  Or am I seeing things?

If I’m right, perhaps:

1) Someone should fix the documentation, so that people don’t rely on incorrect 
slope calculations for something life-critical such as avalanche slope mapping, 
and

2) Someone could tell me a better solution, I think perhaps the best idea is to 
just resample the grid into a projection based on meters, before applying 
gdaldem without any scaling factor.

Thanks for your help. This has been bugging me for sometime, but I finally 
decided to speak up.

—
John Abraham
[email protected]


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