Terrain

Not to be confused with Terrane.
For the fruit, see Terret gris.
Relief map of Sierra Nevada
A shaded and colored image (i.e. terrain is enhanced) of varied terrain from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. This shows elevation model of New Zealand's Alpine Fault running about 500 km (300 mi) long. The escarpment is flanked by a vast chain of hills between the fault and the mountains of New Zealand's Southern Alps. Northeast is towards the top.

Terrain, or land relief, is the vertical and horizontal dimension of land surface. When relief is described underwater, the term bathymetry is used.

Terrain is used as a general term in physical geography, referring to the lay of the land. This is usually expressed in terms of the elevation, slope, and orientation of terrain features. Terrain affects surface water flow and distribution. Over a large area, it can affect weather and climate patterns.

Importance

The understanding of terrain is critical for many reasons:

Relief

Relief (or local relief) refers specifically to the quantitative measurement of vertical elevation change in a landscape. It is the difference between maximum and minimum elevations within a given area, usually of limited extent.[1] The relief of a landscape can change with the size of the area over which it is measured, making the definition of the scale over which it is measured very important. Because it is related to the slope of surfaces within the area of interest and to the gradient of any streams present, the relief of a landscape is a useful metric in the study of the Earth's surface.

Geomorphology

Geomorphology is in large part the study of the formation of terrain or topography. Terrain is formed by intersecting processes:

Tectonic processes such as orogenies cause land to be elevated, and erosional or weathering processes cause land to be worn away to lower elevations.

Land surface parameters are quantitative measures of various morphometric properties of a surface. The most common examples are used to derive slope or aspect of a terrain or curvatures at each location. These measures can also be used to derive hydrological parameters that reflect flow/erosion processes. Climatic parameters are based on the modelling of solar radiation or air flow.

Land surface objects, or landforms, are definite physical objects (lines, points, areas) that differ from the surrounding objects. The most typical examples arelines of watersheds, stream patterns, ridges, break-lines, pools or borders of specific landforms.

See also

References

  1. Summerfield, M.A., 1991, Global Geomorphology, Pearson, 537 p. ISBN 9780582301566

Additional reading

External links

The dictionary definition of terrain at Wiktionary