2026 study Senses: Sight

Who sees the panels

Phoebus demo layout, 229 blocks, 2,139 ac, Marengo County, Alabama. USGS 3DEP 2020 lidar; FEMA USA Structures; USGS TNM roads.

Every permit hearing asks who is going to see the panels. The lidar surface answers it with the trees in it: every home within a mile looks across the 2 m surface at every array cell, and the woods in between screen what they screen in real life. Turn the trees off and you get the bare ground run, the worst case a flat analysis would show. The portal runs this on the client's own lidar.

This run

With trees, 5.5 ft eye, 8 ft panels

Homes within a mile--

Homes that see any panel--

Median in view, of those--

Road samples that see panels--

Home

Array in view--

Nearest visible block--

Distance to it--

Click any home on the map, or step through the homes that see panels, most acres first.

Heights

Eye

Panels

5.5 ft is a standing eye, 10 ft a second floor window. Roads ran at 5.5 ft only.

Trees in the surface (off: bare ground)

Show

Homes Roads Arrays Visibility heat Bare ground strip

North of 32.48 the shaded strip is bare ground from the 2024 lidar terrain with no trees modeled, so what its homes (hollow rings) see is an upper bound.

Method

Homes are USA Structures footprints within a mile of a block, eye at the centroid. Roads are sampled every 50 m. Line of sight runs on the 2 m lidar surface in UTM 16N with earth curvature, to every 2 m array cell at the panel height. The heat counts the homes that see each cell.

Loading the viewshed

1 home sees itmost

Sees panels Sees none Road in view Home in the strip Bare ground only