heighting

Heighting is a term used in several technical fields to describe the determination or adjustment of heights, typically with reference to a standard vertical datum such as mean sea level or the geoid. In surveying and geodesy, heighting refers to establishing the vertical position of points by measuring height differences relative to a known benchmark. Common methods include spirit-leveling and differential leveling to obtain orthometric heights, and trigonometric heighting, which uses measured distances and vertical angles to calculate height differences from a baseline. Modern practice may supplement or replace traditional leveling with GNSS-based heighting, which uses global navigation satellite systems and geoid models to estimate height relative to a reference ellipsoid or a corrected geoid model.

In geographic information systems and cartography, heighting is the process of assigning vertical coordinates to terrain data, producing digital elevation models and representing surface heights in maps and 3D models. Data sources for heighting include conventional surveys, LiDAR, radar, and photogrammetry, each with its own vertical precision and datum considerations. The term is less common in everyday language today; practitioners more often refer to height measurement, height determination, or vertical positioning, depending on the application.

Heighting also appears historically in surveying literature as a general term for height transfer or height computation between points. See also hypsometry, leveling, trigonometric heighting, and GNSS heighting.