OpenTopography Blog

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

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Posts from June 2010

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2010 GSA Annual Meeting - Applications of Airborne and Terrestrial Lidar

Posted on Fri, June 25, 2010 by Chris Crosby in Meetings • TLS

This GSA 2010 LiDAR session announcement went out this morning via various listservs.  This session, coupled with the accompanying Pardee Keynote Symposium and the Terrestrial Laser Scanning: Applications in Geology and Geomorphology session that was announced previously, means that GSA is shaping up to be a great meeting for Earth science applications of LiDAR.  I’ll be giving a talk in the Pardee session.  Hope to see you there!

We would like to draw your attention to the following Topical Session at the 2010 GSA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado (Oct. 31st - Nov. 3rd):

T32. Seeing the True Shape of Earth’s Surface: Applications of Airborne and Terrestrial LiDAR in the Geosciences (Oral and Poster)

High-resolution lidar data are now becoming available over large areas of earth’s surface. This session will examine how these highly detailed images of the landscape provide unprecedented opportunities for qualitative and quantitative analysis of earth processes. We invite presentations from any application of lidar in the geosciences. The session is being co-sponsored by the GSA Engineering Geology , Structural Geology and Tectonics, Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology, Sedimentary Geology , Geoinformatics, and Geophysics Divisions and will accompany a Pardee Keynote Symposium on the same topic.

Conveners:
Ian Madin ()
Kurt Frankel ()

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OpenTopography Overview Video

Posted on Mon, June 21, 2010 by Chris Crosby in OpenTopography Updates • Video

The OpenTopography ASU Capstone team - a group of senior undergraduate (who have now graduated - congrats!) School of Computing and Informatics students at Arizona State supervised by OpenTopography Co-I Ramon Arrowsmith - have released another nice video about OpenTopography.  This video provides an introduction to the OpenTopography Facility:

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Recap: Accessing Haiti Earthquake LiDAR Data

Posted on Mon, June 21, 2010 by Chris Crosby in 2010 Haiti EQ • Data

Following the January 12th, 2010 Haiti earthquake I wrote a number of blog posts related to the post-earthquake LiDAR data that were collected by the Center for Imaging Science at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Kucera International, and ImageCat, Inc (with funding from the World Bank), and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA).  As a result of these posts OpenTopography gets quite a bit of traffic from people looking for information about these data.  Although discussed in previous posts, we still get emails asking how to access the data.

Given that there appears to be some confusion, here is a quick summary of how to access the publicly available Haiti lidar data products.  If you are aware of other pathways to the data leave a comment and I’ll update the list.

Point cloud data:

The World Bank funded data are available from the RIT Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response (IPLER) Haiti earthquake page.  Available products include classified point clouds in LAS format and first return (SEM) and bare earth (DEM) terrain models in GeoTIFF formats.  From the IPLER Haiti page:

Data can be DOWNLOADED: Anonymous FTP (not an SFTP) using thor.cis.rit.edu OR the WASP HTTP Site

UPDATE August 5th, 2010: OpenTopography is now hosting the full World Bank - ImageCat Inc. - RIT Haiti Earthquake LiDAR point cloud dataset.  You can access these data HERE.


Gridded Products (DEMs):

First return (SEM) and bare earth (DEM) terrain models in GeoTIFF formats (derived from the LAS point cloud data) are available via the IPLER Haiti FTP and HTTP sites listed above, or from an FTP site hosted by the USGS that was deployed to host earthquake-related data: http://edcftp.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/disaster/201001_Earthquake_Haiti/

Google Earth Image Overlays:

Using the gridded World Bank LiDAR data downloaded from the USGS FTP site above, I generated a cache of hillshade imagery and a network linked KML file to access these images in Google Earth.  Download of the KML file and more information can be found in this blog post: Haiti LiDAR imagery in Google Earth

NGA ALIRT LiDAR:

Access to NGA ALIRT LiDAR data are via the NGA Haiti ALIRT page, which provides an overview map of the collection area and a link to download ”Geospatial Data Files”.  Products range from movies and PDF visuals of data to DSMs in GeoTIFF format.

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Boise Center Aerospace Laboratory LiDAR Outreach Videos

Posted on Mon, June 07, 2010 by Chris Crosby in Education • Google Earth • Video

Nancy Glenn from the Idaho State University Department of Geosciences Boise Center Aerospace Laboratory (BCAL) sent along a link to a collection of outreach videos they have been developing that provide 3D visualizations using LiDAR and other digital data.  For example, the following video provides a narrated tour of the Snake River in eastern Idaho:

The BCAL videos page also features a 3D tour of the Borah Peak Earthquake rupture and an introduction to LiDAR technology.  These resources, produced with National Science Foundation Idaho EPSCoR Program funding, are great resources for education and outreach.

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