GEOtiled: A ScalableWorkflow for Generating Large Datasets of High-Resolution Terrain Parameters

Terrain parameters such as slope, aspect, and hillshading are essential in various applications, including agriculture, forestry, and hydrology. However, generating high-resolution terrain parameters is computationally intensive, making it challenging to provide these value-added products to communities in need. We present a scalable workflow called GEOtiled that leverages data partitioning to accelerate the computation of terrain parameters from digital elevation models, while preserving accuracy. We assess our workflow in terms of its accuracy and wall time by comparing it to SAGA, which is highly accurate but slow to generate results, and to GDAL, which supports memory optimizations but not data parallelism. We obtain a coefficient of determination (R-2) between GEOtiled and SAGA of 0.794, ensuring accuracy in our terrain parameters. We achieve an X6 speedup compared to GDAL when generating the terrain parameters at a high-resolution (10 m) for the Contiguous United States (CONUS).