Hierarchical terrain models describe a topographic surface at different levels of detail, thus providing a multiresolution surface representation as well as a data compression mechanism. We consider the horizon computation problem on a hierarchical polyhedral terrain (in particular, on a hierarchical triangulated irregular network), which involves extracting the horizon of a viewpoint at a given resolution and updating it as the resolution increases. We present an overview of horizon computation algorithms on a nonhierarchical polyhedral terrain. We extend such algorithms to the hierarchical case by describing a method which extracts the terrain edges at a given resolution, and proposing a randomized algorithm for dynamically updating a horizon under insertions and deletions of terain edges.