Contact me
Please let me know about any problems you find on the site. If you do something cool with my maps and data, drop me a line. I'd like to see your work.
P.S. I am not available for freelance cartography.
Terrain, maps, and more
This site started out as a resource for cartographers creating shaded relief, panoramas, land cover, and related raster art on maps. It has since grown to include my other cartographic interests and has become a repository for my maps, all of which are in the public domain.
I hope that you enjoy the site.
Tom Patterson Bio
New stuff
Last update: July 4, 2019
12th ICA Mountain Cartography Workshop, April 14-18, 2020
To be held at Snow Mountain Ranch, Colorado, near Rocky Mountain National Park. Join us to share new developments in cartography, design, and spatial analysis related to mountain environments.
Updating and Enhancing Maps with Landsat 8
A guest blog post on the Avenza website. I discuss two map examples: Prince William Sound, Alaska, where I used Landsat to update glacier extents..And the Big Island of Hawaii where I extracted natural textures from Landsat images.
Big Island of Hawai‘i Landsat Mosaic
A georeferenced mosaic comprised of 10 Landsat scenes. The natural-color image, pan-sharpened to 15-meter resolution, is seamless and cloud-free.
An Ansel Adams-inspired map of Yosemite Valley rendered in black and white and featuring highly detailed terrain that derives from 1-meter resolution LiDAR. The terrain is depicted in 3D as plan oblique relief.
Avenza Cartographer Chronicles
A brief article discussing my passion for cartography, the importance of map design, and using Avenza MAPublisher and Geographic Imager coupled with Adobe software for map production.
Shaded Relief