OpenTopography Blog

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

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Posts from November 2008

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SSA 2009 special session on LiDAR

Posted on Wed, November 26, 2008 by Chris Crosby in Meetings

Here is a call for abstracts for a special session at the 2009 Seismological Society of America meeting in Monterey, CA devoted to applying LiDAR data to the study of active faults.  Full announcement courtesy of Carol Prentice (USGS):

Dear Colleagues - we are organizing a special session for the 2009 Seismological Society of America meeting (April 8-10, in Monterey, CA
- see http://www.seismosoc.org/meetings/2009/index.php) on the application of LiDAR data to the study of active faults.

I hope you will consider submitting an abstract to this special session (deadline is January 11). If you do plan to submit an abstract, could you please as soon as possible - this will help us to put together the best possible session. Also, if you know that you will not be able to submit and abstract, that would be useful information as well.

Thanks very much, and please forward this to any colleagues who you think might be interested.

Carol Prentice ()
Timothy Dawson
Ashley Streig

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NCALM releases Google Earth-based LIDAR Data Distribution Center

Posted on Mon, November 17, 2008 by Chris Crosby in Data • News • Resources

Today, Ionut Iordache announced the release of NCALM‘s new Google Earth-based LiDAR Data Distribution Center.  This new system is much improved over NCALM’s former means of distributing their public datasets and is likely to be very popular and successful.  Via a simple KML file downloaded from the DDC webpage, users can access footprints showing the extent of all datasets currently available, metadata, links to download standard digital elevation model products, and hillshade overlays that can be viewed directly in Google Earth.

I am currently working with Ionut to provide an overview of NCALM data on the OpenTopography Data Overview map as well as links to download the NCALM file directly from OpenTopography.  This collaboration will be the first step towards bring together access to the various public domain LiDAR topography data via the OpenTopography Portal.

Full email announcement:

We are pleased to announce the upgrade of NCALM’s Data Distribution Center (DDC) to a new Google Earth-based interface that will allow you faster and better access to all of our public LiDAR datasets.

This new interface, developed by NCALM at UC Berkeley, gives you the opportunity to explore our LiDAR datasets before making any download by visualizing the full resolution (1m) shaded relief maps on-the-fly as Google Earth geo-rectified image overlays (both the bare-earth as well as the “unfiltered” shaded relief maps, where available).

The compressed (zip) data tiles are provided in ArcInfo raster format and can be downloaded by visually selecting the tile footprint in Google Earth or batch downloaded for an entire project by accessing a special page (that lists all available data files) and using your favorite download manager program.

The DDC KML file can be stored on your computer for off-line browsing and accessing the meta-data.

You can access the Google Earth KML file and a short tutorial on how to use the interface at this URL:

http://ncalm.berkeley.edu
Check back soon on our DDC KML as we’re in the process of publishing more public LiDAR datasets from NCALM’s 2007 campaign as well as NSF seed money student projects.

PS: I apologize in advance if you receive this message multiple times.

Best Regards,
Ionut Iordache

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Airborne and terrestrial LiDAR coordination for The Great Southern California ShakeOut

Posted on Thu, November 13, 2008 by Chris Crosby in News • TLS

Today at 10 am The Great Southern California ShakeOut staged an Mw=7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault to raise public awareness of earthquake hazards and to allow public responders and the scientific community to practice their response to such an event.  As part of the scientific response, UNAVCO is coordinating community equipment deployment and data acquisition activities via their Great Southern California ShakeOut Response discussion forum.  A sub-forum, coordinated by David Phillips, is tracking the airborne and terrestrial LiDAR response to the earthquake.  As of 12:23 pm (CA time), TLS resources from University of New Mexico LiDAR Lab and NCALM are availble to respond to the event.  NCALM and UT Austin Center for Space Research have also confirmed that they could respond with airborne scanners and aircraft.

LiDAR acquisition immediately following a large, ground-rupturing earthquake on the San Andreas system, will be of great importance to preserve slip distribution, offset features and to provide a post-earthquake snap-shot of the landscape that could then be differenced with the recently acquired B4 or GeoEarthScope LiDAR topography datasets to provide information about near-field deformation along the fault rupture.

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