Views · Click a point
Viewshed
Shows which ground within 1 to 10 km can be seen from a point, for a chosen eye height, with earth curvature and refraction allowed for and, optionally, trees and buildings blocking the view.
When to use it
- Checking what a house site, a deck or a lookout will see, and what will see it.
- Siting a camera, a repeater, a wireless link or a security light.
- Assessing whether a proposed building will be visible from a road or a neighbour.
How to use it
- Open Viewshed and click the observer point.
- Set the eye height above ground, the target height (0 for the ground itself, or the height of a thing you want to see), and the range.
- Choose bare ground, or the LiDAR surface so trees and buildings block the view.
- Run. Visible ground is highlighted; hidden ground is left clear.
How it works
From the observer, rays are cast across the terrain in every direction. Along each ray the tool tracks the steepest angle seen so far; any cell that falls below that angle is hidden behind something nearer. The earth's curvature and standard atmospheric refraction lower distant ground slightly, as they do in reality.
Reading the results
Visible means a straight line exists from the eye to that cell at the target height. It says nothing about how clearly, or whether haze or a window frame intervenes.
Raise the target height to answer "can I see a two-storey house there" rather than "can I see the ground".
Limits and warnings
- Range up to 10 km. Distant views beyond that are not tested.
- With bare ground, shelterbelts and buildings do not block the view. With the surface model they do, but only as they stood on the LiDAR capture date.
- Where 1 m LiDAR has not been flown the tool falls back to the national 8 m elevation model, and the result says what share came from the fallback. The 8 m model was interpolated from 20 m map contours and is not fit for site-scale decisions.
Data and attribution
Results come from the LINZ national 1 m LiDAR bare-earth elevation model, read in your browser, with the national 8 m model filling any gaps. Tools that use the surface model (Sunlight, Viewshed, Object Heights) read the matching LiDAR surface tiles.
Elevation and cadastral data is sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Copyright in each LiDAR survey belongs to the body that commissioned it — a regional or district council, Waka Kotahi, NIWA and around thirty others — rather than to LINZ, which hosts and processes the national dataset. Every file exported from this site names the licensors whose surveys cover the area, and anything you publish from those files carries the same attribution requirement. See https://www.linz.govt.nz/products-services/data/licensing-and-using-data/attributing-elevation-or-aerial-imagery-data