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Western US Ruggedness Raw Values

Published by U.S. Geological Survey | Department of the Interior | Metadata Last Checked: July 18, 2025 | Last Modified: 20200819
"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.

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