Elevation Differencing
Contents
Elevation Differencing¶
Canopy Height and Snow Depth¶
Canopy Height Model is a popular raster product from lidar data. It can be derived from differencing DSM and DEM. Snow depth is another raster product of interest. This is derived by differencing snow-on DEM and snow-off DEM.

We will difference the appropriate elevation model to derive vegetation height and snow depth. To begin, let’s load the necessary packages for this tutorial.
#import packages
import os
import numpy as np
#plotting packages
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import hvplot.xarray
#geospatial packages
import geopandas as gpd #for vector data
import xarray as xr
import rioxarray #for raster data
import rasterstats as rs