Combining several rasters before r.surf.contour?

Question

I have been trying to generate an elevation model from contour lines using first v.to.rast.attr and then r.surf.contour. Generally, it works pretty well, execpt for one issue. My data contains a lot of sea without contours, and r.surf.contour spends a lot of time in the sea region where there are no pixels in the raster generated from r.to.rast.attr. Actually, I'm running one now on a reasobly large area, and after 24 hours, it is at 70%.

The solution for me would be simple. I have sea polygons (and even lake polygons with elevation). I could generate a separatr raster for that using v.to.rast.attr.

But then I need to combine the two rasters into a single raster before running r.surf.contour.

How do I do that?

Answer 1

If you do not need the bathymetry, then don't combine the sea raster with the land elevation raster. Instead use it as a mask as follows:

Make your sea polygon into a raster:

v.to.rast sea output=sea use=value val=1

Then make a land area raster ("inverse" of the sea):

r.mapcalc "land_area = if(sea==1, null(), 1)"

Now set the land_area as a mask, and do your r.surf.contour:

r.mask land_area
r.surf.contour...