Topography

Study of the forms of land surfaces / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Topography is the study of the forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area may refer to the land forms and features themselves, or a description or depiction in maps.

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A topographic map of Stowe, Vermont with contour lines
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This false-color satellite image illustrates topography of the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, with Manhattan at its center.

Topography is a field of geoscience and planetary science and is concerned with local detail in general, including not only relief, but also natural, artificial, and cultural features such as roads, land boundaries, and buildings.[1] In the United States, topography often means specifically relief, even though the USGS topographic maps record not just elevation contours, but also roads, populated places, structures, land boundaries, and so on.[2]

Topography in a narrow sense involves the recording of relief or terrain, the three-dimensional quality of the surface, and the identification of specific landforms; this is also known as geomorphometry. In modern usage, this involves generation of elevation data in digital form (DEM). It is often considered to include the graphic representation of the landform on a map by a variety of cartographic relief depiction techniques, including contour lines, hypsometric tints, and relief shading.