Hi, I'm new to GIS topics, so please forgive if this is an obvious question.
I have some coastal data that is in the form of a triangle mesh where the triangles are of different sizes. The triangles are subdivided the closer they get to the coast. The smallest distance between two vertices in the mesh is about 90ft(27m). Each vertex in the triangle set holds the water height at that location. Each vertex also has a lat/lon associated with it.
I want to get this data into a GIS system like GRASS. I have not seen features in any GIS system so far that allow an unstructed grid of data like this to be easily read in. Please let me know if I am not correct on this, because the ideal situation would be to enter the data as is. However, if I am correct that I will have to transform the data, do any of you have strong ideas about the way this should be done? First, I thought about using shapefiles, because the data is in a polygon format right now. Each triangle really has 3 different water height values, though, so I thought shapefiles would not work since they seem to describe a polygon that maps one value to the area it spans. Next, I found the GEOtiff format. For this, I imagine I would have to transform the triangle mesh into a raster format, and include a projection. Right now there are lat/lons for each data point. Is there any advice on how to accomplish this? One drawback that I see to this is the enormous amount of raster data I would need when the resolution is 27m between data points where the water meets the coast. If I used this approach, I thought I could create several different geotiff files strategically placed to cover the NC coast. Is there a certain size, that hits a sweet spot with GIS systems?
Please help! Thanks, John Overton _______________________________________________ grass-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-user
