OpenTopography is hosting all workshop materials from the June 1st - 2nd, 2010 New Tools in Process-Based Analysis of Lidar Topographic Data Workshop at UCAR in Boulder, CO. The goal of the workshop is to provide researchers in Earth surface processes with an opportunity to gain hands-on knowledge in new methods for analyzing high-resolution topographic data. Visit the workshop website to access tutorials, sample data, and software downloads.
View the workshop website...
OpenTopography is pleased to announce the release of 840 sq kilometers of LiDAR point cloud data collected between January 21st and January 27th, 2010, in response to the January 12th magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake. These data were collected by the Center for Imaging Science at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and Kucera International under sub-contract to ImageCat, Inc., and funded by the Global Facility for Disaster Recovery and Recovery (GFDRR) hosted at the World Bank. These data have been publicly available via open FTP linked from the RIT Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response (IPLER) 2010 Haiti Earthquake page since their release earlier this year. OpenTopography is now hosting the data as a service to the scientific and relief communities and hope that OpenTopography features such as data download by user defined area of interest and on-the-fly digital elevation model (DEM) generation will make these data more easily accessible and therefore increase their utilization.
Posted: August 05 2010
OpenTopography is happy to announce that point cloud LiDAR data for the Napa Watershed in northern California is now available. The Napa data were collected in 2003 by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM). This was one of the first NCALM data sets and digital elevation models derived from these data have been available via the NCALM Data Distribution Center for quite some time. However, this release of the data by OpenTopography marks the first time that the full Napa point cloud data set has been available for download.
This week OpenTopography has also released another update to our system. This release is largely focused on back-end data management systems that are invisible to the user. However, OT 2.1 marks an important milestone for OpenTopography as the updates should significantly improve our ability to quickly ingest and make available new data sets.
Posted: July 27 2010
This week, a paper by OpenTopography team members related to the design of the OpenTopography point cloud database system will be presented by Chaitan Baru at the 2010 International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM) in Heidelberg, Germany. The paper, entitled Database Design for High-Resolution LIDAR Topography Data is one of 41 papers that will presented at the conference and published in a Conference Proceedings volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Posted: June 25 2010
Latest LiDAR Dataset:
World Bank - ImageCat Inc. - RIT Haiti Earthquake LiDAR
Ground Based Geodetic Techniques and Science Applications Ground-based geodesy is a rapidly expanding and evolving technology. Tools such as terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) and/or ground-based radars (GBR) promise to expand our detailed understanding of the fundamental processes that drive a broad range of spatial (3D) and temporal (4D) science applications. We invite contributions that discuss both the technical aspects of the technology and process-based geoscience studies using ground-based geodetic tools such as, but not limited to, TLS and GBR. What are the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the technologies? How is the technology being used to address static and dynamic scientific problems? We encourage contributions from a wide range of disciplines.
Posted: August 10 2010
Posted: August 01 2010