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Abstract

Most solar radiation models implemented in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) operate on 2.5D raster data. There are only a few models using the full 3D information of a point cloud obtained by e.g. Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) systems. However, models performing point cloud based solar radiation modeling are not suitable for large study areas because the huge amount of point cloud data cannot be handled in one go in the computer's main memory. Deconstructing the whole dataset into several tiles requires the usage of buffer areas surrounding each tile to avoid edge effects when calculating necessary features such as slope and aspect as well as shadowing effects of nearby objects within the point cloud. In this paper a point cloud based solar radiation model that is fully implemented in SAGA GIS is presented and applied to large areas.