OpenTopography Blog

Information and discussion related to high-resolution LiDAR topography for the Earth sciences

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NCALM Annual Kurt Frankel and Clint Slatton Lidar Awards

Posted on Wed, April 24, 2013 by Chris Crosby in News

NCALM is pleased to announce two awards supported by Optech Inc., and Riegl USA Inc. - the Kurt Frankel and Clint Slatton Awards.  Information on the two awards is below.  Complete guidelines and nomination forms can be found on the www.ncalm.org website.  In addition, requests for nominations will also be advertised in EOS on May 7, 14, and 21st.

Deadline for nominations is June 1, 2013.  Nomination forms should be emailed to Laura Murphy, Program Manager at .
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University of Houston and Riegl USA Inc. Kurt L. Frankel Award

The University of Houston and Riegl USA are pleased to announce the establishment of the Kurt Frankel Award, to recognize creative and innovative research exploiting airborne LiDAR and other data, such as cosmogenic dating, for geological and geophysical research in tectonic geomorphology, or closely related specialties. Recommendations for candidates of the Frankel Award may be made by the submission of a brief summary (generally not more than one page in length) of the work for which the person is being nominated, along with documentation of the value of the work, typically including at least one published paper in a refereed journal. Recipients of the Frankel Award will be selected by the National Center for Airborne Mapping (NCALM) Steering Committee. It is anticipated that the award will be made once per year, at a time and place to be announced, and will consist of an appropriate certificate and a cash award $1000. Details on submitting nominations may be found at http://www.ncalm.org

Kurt Frankel was born and raised in Cleveland Ohio. He earned a B.S. in Geology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2000, followed by a M.S. in Earth and Environmental Science at Lehigh University in 2002, and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 2007. After completing his studies at USC, Kurt joined the faculty of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Technological Institute, Atlanta, GA.

Kurt’s research focused on tectonic geomorphology and cosmogenic geochronology. He worked extensively in the Great Basin, California, Turkey, Italy, Mongolia, and the Appalachians. His undergraduate thesis described the slip of several Holocene fault scarps in Death Valley, California. For his M.S. work he developed a set of mountain front topographic metrics to quantify the long-term slip rates of normal-fault-bound mountain fronts. His Ph.D. work involved novel applications of LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and cosmogenic dating to compare geologic and GPS-geodetic rates of slip in the Eastern California Shear Zone.

During his short, but prolific career, Kurt organized field trips, co-directed two Keck undergraduate projects, chaired meeting topical sessions, served as a member and then chair of the NSF National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), published widely in international journals, and was in the process of building a nationally-recognized program in tectonic geomorphology.

Kurt was a field geologist who loved the outdoors. He was an avid runner, biker, and hiker. For everyone who had the honor and pleasure of working with Kurt, he will be remembered for his infectious enthusiasm, quick laugh, and devotion to his projects, colleagues, and students. He left behind his wife of two years, Stephanie Briggs, who he met and was committed to since their undergraduate days at UNC-CH. Kurt was killed during a morning bicycle ride, when he was struck from behind by a motorist.


University of Houston and Optech Inc. Kenneth Clinton “Clint” Slatton Award

The University of Houston and Optech Inc. are pleased to announce the establishment of the Kenneth Clinton “Clint” Slatton Award, to recognize creative and innovative research exploiting airborne LiDAR, multi-scale estimation, data fusion, and statistical signal processing, for scientific, engineering, military, and management applications. Recommendations for candidates of the Slatton Award may be made by the submission of a brief summary (generally not more than one page in length) of the work for which the person is being nominated, along with documentation of the value of the work, typically including at least one published paper in a refereed journal. Recipients of the Slatton Award will be selected by the National Center for Airborne Mapping (NCALM) Steering Committee. It is anticipated that the award will be made once per year, at a time and place to be announced, and will consist of an appropriate certificate and a cash award of $1000. Details on submitting nominations may be found at http://www.ncalm.org

Kenneth Clinton “Clint” Slatton was born in Huntsville, Alabama on October 13, 1970. He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin, earning his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2001. He moved to Gainesville, Florida, in 2003, joining the faculty in the University of Florida (UF) Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Civil and Coastal Engineering. Clint became a Co-PI for the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), and developed classes in airborne laser mapping and related remote sensing techniques that attracted large numbers of students and contributed to technological advances that brought long-standing and new scientific questions within the reach of researchers at leading academic institutions and governmental agencies across the nation. Clint’s research was interdisciplinary, covering the areas of remote sensing, multi-scale estimation, data fusion, statistical signal processing, lidar and radar applications. He was particularly interested in developing methods to extract the maximum information from remote sensing observations by combining observations from different technologies to exploit the complementary information derived from each. He led a vibrant research program of international renown and was an outstanding instructor and mentor who will be missed by his professional colleagues and students.

Clint Slatton was a widely respected member of the UF faculty, and in 2009, just months after his diagnosis of metastatic melanoma, he received tenure, becoming an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department. Even at the young age of 39, Clint had already established himself as an exceptionally talented researcher receiving, in 2007, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award was presented to Clint and only a few other researchers from across the country, in a White House ceremony. And Clint also had received several research grants and contracts from the NSF, NASA, U.S. Army, and Office of Naval Research. Just days before Clint’s death he and his colleagues at UF received approval from NSF of a grant to develop a new green laser sensor-head for the airborne laser mapping system used by NCALM to collect observations for NSF PIs. Even though he was suffering badly from his illness, Clint was excited by the prospects of the advances in science that he thought were sure to come from mapping areas of the earth’s surface covered by shallow water (including streams, lakes, and coastal areas) that will be made possible by the new sensor.

For relaxation Clint enjoyed astronomy, playing guitar, watching college football, and visiting the Slatton family’s Tennessee farm. But as much as he enjoyed his work and personal pastimes, Clint’s greatest source of happiness was the time he spent with his wife Jennifer and their five children -William, age 9, Emma, age 6, Ryan, age 4, Jack, age 2, and Thomas, age 6 months. Clint Slatton passed away at home in Gainesville, Florida, surrounded by his family, on March 30, 2010, after a valiant 13-month battle with cancer.

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UNAVCO Terrestrial Laser Scanning Internship

Posted on Mon, April 01, 2013 by Chris Crosby in Jobs • News • TLS

UNAVCO is offering a paid internship for summer 2013 to focus on the development of community support resources for the UNAVCO Geodetic Imaging (Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) - a.k.a., ground-based LiDAR) program. Specifically, the intern will work with the UNAVCO Education and Community Engagement (ECE) and TLS groups to develop online resources such as documentation, written and video tutorials, short course training modules, and other content focused on the collection and processing of TLS data.  The framework and presentation of the new TLS content will be used as a model for other UNAVCO curriculum materials and outreach information.

Skills developed will include familiarity in TLS data products, metadata, and software. The intern will also learn about developing, publishing and maintaining web-based content and other instructional media. The intern will work in a multi-disciplinary team consisting of UNAVCO field engineers, data engineers, software developers, and educational and community engagement specialists. There may also be the opportunity to collect and process TLS data in the field, and to interact with UNAVCO’s diverse TLS scientific community.

Additional information and application for the TLS ECE position can be found here:  https://unavco-openhire.silkroad.com/epostings/index.cfm?fuseaction=app.jobInfo&version=1&jobid=51 The application closes 5:00 p.m. (MDT) on Friday. April 12, 2013

This Education and Community Engagement Internship at UNAVCO is one of several positions currently listed that include Field Engineering, HR, and accounting- details via UNAVCO’s career portal: https://unavcocareers.silkroad.com/

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Understanding Earth-surface processes in the alpine environment from high resolution topography

Posted on Thu, March 07, 2013 by Chris Crosby in Education • Workshops

OpenTopography is a co-sponsor of a 2013 European Geosciences Union Summer School program on: ”Understanding Earth-surface processes in the alpine environment from high resolution topography”. The course will be taught July 29 to August 4th, 2013 in Italian Dolomites.

Ramon Arrowsmith (ASU) - a Co-Investigator on OpenTopography - is on the summer school scientific committee and will be presenting a keynote talk during the course.

Aims and Scope:
Training in field acquisition, processing and interpretation of high resolution topographic data with ground-based (GPS, Terrestrial Laser Scanner) and airborne instruments (LiDAR, Light Detection and Ranging), for the recognition of geomorphic signatures (erosion, landslides, channel heads, channel network) and for the understanding earth-surface processes in the Dolomites-Alpine context.

Audience: PhD and MSc students in Earth Science field

Format:
- Keynote speakers in the morning
- PC working group in the afternoon
- Two days field expedition with instruments in high altitude area
- Final project work with 30’ presentation each group; the results will presented at EGU General Assembly 2014.
- Diploma ceremony during the social dinner, 3rd July night

Additional details on the course:
- Course Brochure (PDF)
- Course Poster (PDF)

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Lidar Short Courses at 2013 GSA Northeastern Section Meeting

Posted on Tue, February 19, 2013 by Chris Crosby in Education • Meetings

Dave Tewksbury from Hamilton College got in touch to let us know that he’ll be teaching a pair of lidar short courses at the 2013 Geological Society of America Northeastern Section Meeting in Bretton Woods, NH. Both courses are on Sunday, March 17th, with the first in the morning and the second in the afternoon.

Details:

Introduction to LiDAR
David Tewksbury, Hamilton College
Sun., 17 March, 9 a.m.-noon
What is LiDAR? How are LiDAR data collected? How can that data be used? This workshop will focus on Airborne Laser Swath Mapping (ALSM) and its application to the geological sciences, including base maps, identification of geomorphic features, glacial/periglacial landforms, landslides, and coastal changes. The workshop will also include a brief discussion of how ALSM differs from Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS). Sources for both processed and raw LiDAR data will be examined.

Seeing the Ground beneath the Trees: Working with LiDAR Data in ArcGIS
David Tewksbury, Hamilton College.
Sun., 17 March, 1-4 p.m. Limit: 15 participants.
This is a hands-on workshop working with LiDAR LAS files in ArcGIS 10.1. LAS data of the northern Crawford Notch area will be processed to create both Digital Surface Models (DSM), Digital Terrain Models (DTM) as well as intensity image. Sources for both processed and raw LiDAR data will be examined as well.

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Geodetic Imaging Using LiDAR Session at AGU Meeting of the Americas, Cancun, Mexico

Posted on Fri, January 25, 2013 by Chris Crosby in Meetings • News

The American Geophysical Union Meeting of the Americas, May 14-17, 2013 in Cancun, Mexico will host a session on Geodetic imaging with lidar.  The session description:

Airborne lidar enables researchers to make ‘bare earth’ geodetic images of areas for which no accurate topographic maps exist. In addition to mapping surface displacements associated with seismic events, landslides, and storm damage, recent airborne lidar observations have captured archaeological ruins hidden beneath tropical rain forests in Belize, Mexico, and Honduras, revolutionizing the practice of archaeology in Mesoamerica. This session will focus on recent scientific results obtained from lidar based bare earth geodetic images, with a special interest in scientific findings enabled by the ability to map with meter resolution, for the first time, remote regions shrouded by heavy vegetation, including tropical rain forests.

Additional details in the session announcement email below:

Dear Colleagues,
A session titled “G04: Geodetic Imaging Using Light Detection and Ranging (lidar)” sponsored by Global Environmental Change (GC), Natural Hazards (NH) and Near Surface Geophysics (NS) has been planned at the AGU Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico. You can see the session abstract at the link below.

http://moa.agu.org/2013/scientific-program/sessions/g04/

Please consider submitting abstract for the session. Deadline for the abstract submission is Feb 6, 2013.

Best regards,

Ramesh L Shrestha, Director
NSF National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM)
UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
450 Cullen Performance Hall
Houston, TX 77204-5050

Email: rlshrestha@uh.edu
Voice: (832) 842-8882 Fax: (713) 743-0186

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NCALM User Survey

Posted on Fri, January 04, 2013 by Chris Crosby in Data • News

The NSF-funded National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) is soliciting input into how well they have been serving their user community and guidance on future activities. OpenTopography is currently the primary data access point for NCALM-collected data, and OT users therefore represent significant consumers of NCALM data.  Please take a moment to reflect upon NCALM and how you have utilized data they have collected, then complete the survey linked below.  Thanks.

Dear LiDAR Users,

To gather community input on how well the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) is accomplishing its mission and to define where future efforts should be directed, NCALM has created a short survey for LiDAR users.  The success and vitality of NCALM depends on community input.  The 10 minutes it will take to complete this survey (linked below) represents a very real investment in NCALM’s future.

Thank you.

Survey Link: survey.egr.uh.edu/index.php/survey/index/sid/398332/lang/en

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United States Interagency Elevation Inventory

Posted on Wed, November 21, 2012 by Chris Crosby in Data • Resources

A common question we receive at OpenTopography is ”do you know if there is lidar available for location xxx?”. Typically, when we get this question I refer people to the OpenTopography Find Data page (an increasingly rich source for lidar data) and this page of links to online sources of lidar. But, there are large amounts of data collected by federal, state, and local agencies that can be hard to track down.  Earlier this year, NOAA and the USGS, in collaboration with FEMA, released the United States Interagency Elevation Inventory which is meant to be a clearinghouse for “high-accuracy topographic and bathymetric data for the United States and its territories”. The site does not host data, but it provides metadata and links to dataset sources. As you can see from the screen-cap, there is an impressive amount of high-resolution topography data available if you know where to look:

The elevation inventory was completed in May 2012, and will be updated annually. Although relatively comprehensive, it is not complete, and it currently lacks many datasets collected for the academic community by NCALM and available through OpenTopography. It is also worth noting that the data shown in the Elevation Inventory are highly variable in terms of resolution, quality, data products available, coordinate systems, metadata, etc. Remember, all lidar are not created equal. Regardless, the site is a great resource for anyone trying to determine if there is data available for their location of interest, and goes a long way towards making it easier to locate datasets collected by federal, state and local agencies.

More details from the US Interagency Elevation Inventory site:

The U.S. Interagency Elevation Inventory displays high-accuracy topographic and bathymetric data for the United States and its territories. The project is a collaborative effort between NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey, with contributions from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

This resource is a comprehensive, nationwide listing of known high-accuracy topographic data, including lidar and IfSAR, and bathymetric data, including NOAA hydrographic surveys, multibeam data, and bathymetric lidar. This inventory was completed May 2012 and will be updated annually.

The information provided for each elevation dataset includes many attributes such as vertical accuracy, point spacing, and date of collection. A direct link to access the data or information about the contact organization is also available through the inventory.

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Obtain New Lidar for Your Research: 2012 NCALM Graduate Student Seed Proposal Call

Posted on Mon, October 29, 2012 by Chris Crosby in Data • News

The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) has announced their 2012 call for Graduate Student Seed Proposals.  The NCALM Seed program provides an excellent opportunity for graduate students to obtain lidar data for their research. Data collections are limited to 40 square kilometers.  For examples of data collected under previous NCALM seed grants, see OpenTopography’s archive of NCALM data.  The application deadline is November 12th.  Details:

The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), invites proposals from graduate students seeking airborne laser swath mapping (ALSM) observations covering limited areas (no more than 40 square kilometers) for use in research to earn an M.S. or Ph.D. degree.  Proposals must be submitted online.  For background information and complete guidelines for submitting a proposal, please see http://www.ncalm.org.  The deadline date for proposal submission is November 12, 2012.  For more information contact NCALM@EGR.UH.EDU or call 832-842-8881

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NCALM Data Collection Opportunity in Hawaii, January 2013

Posted on Thu, October 25, 2012 by Chris Crosby in Data • News

The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) has a project scheduled for January 2013 in Hawaii, and is looking for other potential partners who may also be interested in having data collected while they are there. This is a good opportunity to take advantage of the fact that the NCALM instrumentation will already be in Hawaii.  Details:

NCALM will be in Hawaii late January 2013 to collect Near IR LiDAR and optical data (aerial photography and hyperspectral images) for a research project for USGS funded by US Army. In addition, we can also deploy NCALM’s new bathymetric (green) LiDAR if needed. If anybody is interested for additional data collection in Hawaii during this mobilization period please contact Ramesh L. Shrestha (rlshrestha@uh.edu). Tel: (832) 842-8882 for details and cost determinations.

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Methods in Geomorphology session - Remote-sensing (including laser scanning) - at IAG2013

Posted on Fri, September 14, 2012 by Chris Crosby in Meetings

Via the Geomorph-L listserv, an announcement about a session on “Methods in Geomorphology - S26-B Remote-sensing (including laser scanning, applications of radar, etc.)” at the 8th IAG International Conference of Geomorphology to be held in Paris (France) on 27-31 August 2013.

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Dear colleagues,

This is a call for papers at the 8th IAG International Conference of Geomorphology to be held in Paris (France) on 27-31 August 2013. (http://www.geomorphology-iag-paris2013.com/)

We would like to draw your attention to the Methods in Geomorphology session S26-B Remote-sensing (including laser scanning, applications of radar, etc.) organized by Dirk Rieke-Zapp and myself

Recent advances in surveying technology and better availability of high precision surveying tools made it easy for geomorphologists to benefit from data with higher spatial resolution as well as data with much better precision than just 10 years ago. In this session we want to (i) increase the awareness of modern surveying techniques and their application to geomorphology, (ii) provide a platform for researchers to present their experiences with laser scanners, range cameras, close range photogrammetry, terrestrial LASER & RADAR as well as other new surveying tools and (iii) address the question how valuable more precise data and new surveying techniques really are - is our process understanding / are our landscape models ready for high resolution data? Are current models ready for data with mm resolution of a field site? What problems can really be solved by better resolution and better precision? What are the problems during data acquisition?
The proposed session has an overlap with ISPRS Commission V Working Group V/6 - “Close range morphological measurements for the sciences”. While the ISPRS commission meetings are typically visited by professionals of geodesy a similar session at IAG in Paris would allow better communication between professional surveyors and geomorphologists.

Abstracts are due on 15 October 2012 here http://www.geomorphology-iag-paris2013.com/en/submit-abstract

Thomas Dewez (co-chair) & Dirk Rieke-Zapp (chair)
ISPRS Commission V/5
Close-range measurements for bio- and geosciences

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