U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Western US Ruggedness Raw Values

"Vector Ruggedness Measure (VRM) measures terrain ruggedness as the variation in three-dimensional orientation of grid cells within a neighborhood. Vector analysis is used to calculate the dispersion of vectors normal (orthogonal) to grid cells within the specified neighborhood. This method effectively captures variability in slope and aspect into a single measure. Ruggedness values in the output raster can range from 0 (no terrain variation) to 1 (complete terrain variation). Typical values for natural terrains range between 0 and about 0.4. VRM was adapted from a method first proposed by Hobson (1972). VRM appears to decouple terrain ruggedness from slope better than current ruggedness indices, such as TRI or LSRI. See Sappington et al. 2007, for further details" (Sappington 2012). The code from the original tool was no longer compatible with current software versioning. Therefore, we updated the existing code for current software standards.

Get Data and Metadata
Author(s) Justin Welty orcid, Michelle Jeffries orcid
Publication Date 2018
Beginning Date of Data Unknown
Ending Date of Data Unknown
Data Contact
FRESC Science Data Coordinator
DOI https://doi.org/10.5066/F76D5S92
Citation Welty, J., and Jeffries, M., 2018, Western US Ruggedness Raw Values: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/F76D5S92.
Metadata Contact
FRESC Science Data Coordinator
Metadata Date 2020-08-19
Related Publication
Citations of these data No citations of these data are known at this time.
Access public
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Harvest Source: ScienceBase
Harvest Date: 2025-01-06T22:33:54.919Z