Welcome to the interactive web schedule for the 2019 Spring NEARC Conference! For tips on how to navigate this site, visit the "Helpful Info" section. To return to the NEARC website, go to: www.northeastarc.org/spring-nearc.html.
The schedule is subject to change (as of May 13, 2019). Please check back for updates.
ABSTRACT: This presentation will provide an overview of a visual impact assessment for a proposed wind farm and how GIS was utilized throughout the lifecycle of the project. ERM was involved in the planning and permitting of a wind farm and performed viewshed analysis on existing turbines and potential turbine locations to determine the visual impact of the new wind turbine installation. The viewshed tool is a powerful analytic tool that determines line-of-sight from a ground raster to one or more elevated points. In addition to the standard viewshed utilizing Bare-Earth Digital Elevation Models, ERM acquired additional GIS datasets in order to produce an adjusted model that accounted for the screening effect of forested areas. Field teams used this data on mobile devices in order to ground-truth potential impacts compared to sensitive resource areas.