PRO Production

Workflow-grade Pro analysis with audit-ready outputs.

workflow pro

## Workflow Narrative

Solar Site Suitability Analysis

### Problem It Solves

Where are top solar candidates based on terrain suitability, and which shortlisted sites are strong enough for deeper engineering review?

### Who It Is For

- Solar development teams and regional screening analysts.

### Primary User

Solar developers, renewable consultants, and utility planning units.

### What It Does

- Computes solar siting suitability and visual-impact proxies from terrain.
- Selects and ranks candidate point sites.
- Emits attributed candidate vectors for downstream review.

### How It Works

- Computes terrain suitability response from slope/aspect and neighborhood context.
- Estimates visual-impact proxy from terrain prominence and local exposure contrasts.
- Applies thresholding and ranking to emit top candidate points with attributes.
- Indicative formula: suitability ~= f(slope, aspect, relief); candidates = arg top-k(suitability) above threshold.

### Why It Wins

- Emits ranked candidate vectors with visual-impact attributes, enabling immediate GIS review and filtering.

### Typical Buying Trigger

Early project screening demands a short list of high-probability solar candidates across a large area.

### Typical Presets

- higher candidate_threshold for only top candidates.
- lower threshold plus larger max_candidate_sites for exploratory workflows.

## Inputs

Parameter | Optional | Description
--- | --- | ---
dem | no | Digital elevation model used as the terrain reference surface.
candidate_threshold | no | Minimum suitability threshold required for candidate-site extraction.
max_candidate_sites | no | Upper limit on the number of candidate sites emitted in vector output.

## Outputs

Parameter | Type | Description
--- | --- | ---
suitability_score | GeoTIFF | Core suitability score raster produced by the model.
visual_impact | GeoTIFF | Visual-impact raster used to screen candidate sites and stakeholder constraints.
candidate_sites | GeoPackage | Vector candidate-site features passing selection thresholds.
summary | JSON | Machine-readable summary report containing run metadata, QA diagnostics, and key metrics.
html_report | HTML | Human-readable customer-facing report generated from the summary contract for stakeholder review and QA traceability.

When `sweep_spec` is supplied, the workflow also emits `run_matrix_summary`, `sensitivity_report`, `sensitivity_report_html`, and `stability_map`. The sensitivity report includes `metrics.primary_metric`, `metrics.primary_relative_span`, and `metrics.stability_class` (`high`, `medium`, `low`), while `stability_map` uses classes `3=high`, `2=medium`, `1=low`.

## Python Example

    import whitebox_workflows as wbw

    wbe = wbw.WbEnvironment(include_pro=True, tier="pro")

    suit, vis, sites, summary = wbe.solar_site_suitability_analysis(
        dem="data/dem.tif",
        candidate_threshold=0.7,
        max_candidate_sites=200,
        output_prefix="output/solar_siting",
    )

    print(suit)
    print(vis)
    print(sites)
    print(summary)

## License Notice

Use of this function requires a license for Whitebox Workflows Professional (WbW-Pro). Please visit www.whiteboxgeo.com to purchase a license.

## Project Links

WbW Homepage User Manual Support WbW