OpenTopography Blog

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

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USGS Topo Maps for Google Earth

Posted on Mon, March 23, 2009 by Chris Crosby in Data • Google Earth • Resources

The Google Earth Library has announced that they are in the process of importing all 50,000+ USGS topographic maps into KML format for use in Google Earth.  From the website:

A couple months ago I began a project to import all 50,000+ USGS Topographic Maps into Google Earth. This is a huge undertaking that will likely take me several more months to finish all 50 US States. These maps are intended to provide a free alternative to expensive commercial products that often cost $80 or more per state or charge monthly access fees.  Plus you get the benefit of using the topo maps with Google Earth.

The Topo maps are saved as individual KMZ files which must be downloaded in their entirety before they will be visible in Google Earth.  Most of the maps are less than 5 megabytes, but some are as large as 20 megabytes so the speed at which the maps load will depend greatly on the speed of your Internet connection.

Currently, topo quads are available for Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Learn more and download the KML file at: http://www.gelib.com/usgs-topographic-maps.htm

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NCALM Data Distribution Center wins Google KML in Research Contest

Posted on Tue, March 10, 2009 by Chris Crosby in Data • News

Yesterday Google announced the winners of their KML in Research contest via the Google LatLong blog.  Ionut Iordache, of the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) at UC Berkeley was awarded for his very nice NCALM Data Distribution Center KML file that allows integrated access to tiled LIDAR DEMs as well as hillshade overlays in Google Earth.  Google Earth provides an excellent platform to visualize and then download LIDAR-derived topography and the NCALM DDC KML is an nice example of how a lot of functionality can be bundled into a small, easily-downloadable, KML.  The Google Earth files available via OpenTopograph.org/kml offer similar capabilities as the NCALM DDC file, but for a variety of reasons we have chosen not to integrate them into a single download like the file produced by Ionut.

A full list of winners in the KML in Research contest can be found here.  Congratulations to Ionut and NCALM!

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OpenTopography Hardware

Posted on Fri, March 06, 2009 by Chris Crosby in OpenTopography Updates

Today the GEON team was in the SDSC machine room moving GEON and OpenTopography machines to new racks as part of a reorganization of the machine room.  Since I don’t visit the machine room very often, I took some photos of the hardware that makes OpenTopo work.  This photo shows the rack that holds the OpenTopo Portal (Gridsphere) server as well as the LIDAR database cluster (8 front-end nodes plus a four node disk array (20 TB total).  In a different rack is the 3 node compute cluster for LIDAR data processing (DEM generation) and the visualization machine that generates the browse images (jpgs) and Google Earth KMZ files for each job.  Other hardware involved in making OpenTopography work is the SDSC “webfarm” server that runs the OpenTopography.org website and the tile DEM server that is currently running at ASU.

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AGU Joint Assembly and Silvilaser 2009

Posted on Mon, February 23, 2009 by Chris Crosby in Meetings

A few recent announcements about upcoming meetings that may be of interest to the OpenTopography community:

”Application of Laser Scanning to Geophysical Studies” at the AGU Joint Assembly 24-27 May 2009 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada:

G04:  Application of Laser Scanning to Geophysical Studies

Laser Scanning methods (e.g. LiDAR) have opened up new realms of resolution in the surveying and characterization of the surface of the earth. This rapidly evolving technology enables new perspectives on geodetic and geophysical problems, while presenting new challenges in developing techniques and software to process, visualize and interpret the vast quantities of data it can produce. This session will focus on geophysical investigations using terrestrial or airborne laser scanning or studies that address technical issues of applying laser scanning to geophysical problems.

The abstract deadline is 4 March 2009.  Abstracts related to either airborne or terrestrial laser scanning are welcomed and encouraged.

Sincerely yours,
James Foster and David Phillips

Silvilaser 2009 - Lidar Remote Sensing for Vegetation Studies

Dear Colleague,

As you may know, the Silvilaser 2009 conference on Lidar Remote Sensing for Vegetation Studies will be organized in College Station, Texas, USA, October 14-16, 2009, on the Texas A&M University campus. Silvilaser 2009 is the 8th international conference on lidar applications for assessing vegetation, with a spectrum of topics that include ground-based, airborne, and satellite sensors. The range of applications is broad and contains forest inventory, mapping of biophysical parameters – biomass, carbon, and LAI - habitat, and 3D structure assessment. The aim of the conference is to bring together an international group of lidar scientists to present ongoing research on assessing vegetated ecosystems, to facilitate and reinforce international ties, and to discuss future research directions for studying vegetation with lidar sensors on all three platforms. 

The conference website has been updated, so please take a look and find information about topics, important dates, and the template for preparing a paper submission. The deadline for submission of papers for oral or poster presentations is April 3rd. Papers of up to eight pages will be blind-reviewed by the Scientific Committee for being accepted for presentation. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing (PE&RS) will publish a special issue with papers presented in the conference, in January 2011. PE&RS papers will be selected through the journal review process.

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, I kindly invite you to visit http://silvilaser.tamu.edu/ and consider submitting a paper or participating in the conference. Please forward the message to colleagues of yours that might be interested and accept my apologies for any cross-postings.

I look forward to seeing you in College Station. Best regards,

Sorin Popescu, Silvilaser 2009 Chair

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High resolution terrain session at MODSIM09

Posted on Sun, December 21, 2008 by Chris Crosby in Meetings

Another email announcement about an upcoming meeting with a session devoted to high resolution topography data.  This session looks quite interesting as the MODSIM09 conference has the stated goal of “Interfacing Modeling and Simulation with Mathematical and Computational Sciences”.  The abstract deadline is December 31st.  Email initially distributed via the ASU LiDAR listserv.

Dear lidar listserv members

At the Modelling and Simulation conference next July in Cairns, Australia, we are running a session on using and working with high resolution terrain data with a particular interest in lidar - see details below.

We extend an invitation to submit an abstract (up to 500 words) for this session. I apologise for the late notice, abstract submission closes at the end of December.  Abstracts can be submitted through the conference web site http://www.mssanz.org.au/modsim09/index.html

Best wishes

John Gallant
Research Team Leader - Terrain Analysis John.Gallant@csiro.au +61 2 6246 5734

F13. Terrain analysis and geomorphometry with high resolution terrain data
Organisers: Drs. Gregory Summerell (Gregory.Summerell@environment.nsw.gov.au)
John Gallant, Trevor Dowling and John Wilford

This session covers the broad area of high resolution terrain analysis and geomorphometry with regard to data capture, processing, integration and applications. The session aims to broaden these topics to include new or improved techniques that have lead to wider availability and use of high resolution terrain data, encourages knowledge sharing of experiences, problems and advances in this rapidly growing area of technology and science. The session wishes to build from previous MODSIM sessions on this topic where key areas identified for further development included: 1) the need to develop a library of algorithm techniques to avoid duplication of effort when using finer scaled terrain analysis data, 2) advances in utilising the multiple returns acquired from data acquisition techniques such as LiDAR, 3) developing the most efficient ways to utilise technology for data storage and handling, 4) integrating terrain analysis data at different resolutions to provide different but compatible elevation data for different purposes, and 5) development of tools for terrain analysis quality assessment. Papers that are showing progress on these issues are encouraged. In addition general topics of interest to this session also include: A) new applications of terrain analysis data made possible by higher resolutions, B) new methods to extract information from high resolution terrain data, C) applications in geomorphology, ecology, soil science or hydrology opened up by the new technology, D) any other topic related to the collection, processing and use of high resolution terrain information.

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Close range morphological measurement for the earth sciences

Posted on Mon, December 08, 2008 by Chris Crosby in TLS

Here is an announcement related to terrestrial laser scanning that should be of interest to the OpenTopography community. The announcement came through on the GEOMOD-LIDAR-L listserv this morning:

Dear Colleagues,

ISPRS V/6: Close range morphological measurement for the earth sciences.

I’m pleased to announce the formation of an International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) working group (V6) to promote and coordinate the use of modern geomatic techniques (terrestrial laser scanning and close range digital photogrammetry) for the measurement of natural objects. This should be of interest to a wide spectrum of researchers involved in 3D reconstruction, modelling and quantitative earth science research. The following fields are just an example of those within the broader earth science discipline: geomorphology, geology, glaciology, hydrology, agriculture, forestry, surface roughness and climate change studies.

For further details contact either myself, Jim Chandler j.h.chandler@lboro.ac.uk (Chair), or Rene Wackrow r.wackrow@lboro.ac.uk (secretary). Please note that involvement/membership is free and open to all.

Please circulate this announcement to colleagues who may be interested, and apologies for any cross-posting.

Best regards,

Simon Buckley
Co-chair, ISPRS Working Group V/6

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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 (cprentice@usgs.gov)
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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Call for NCALM Seed Proposals

Posted on Mon, October 20, 2008 by Chris Crosby in News

The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping has issued their annual call for Seed Proposals from graduate students.

The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) invites graduate students who are interested in research grade ALSM data to make use of the center’s facilities through the Seed Money Projects programme. This year the program will fund 10 seed projects covering area no more than 40 sq. km. each.The motivation for such seed projects is to have graduate students start their preliminary scientific research and subsequently develop larger NSF proposals to make scientific discoveries using observations and data sets from ALSM technology.

The deadline for proposals is October 31st November 10.  More information is available at the NCALM Seed Proposal website

UPDATE (10/27 GilbertClub email):

We have increased our funding number to 10, so there will be greater opportunity than in past years.

In 2009, NCALM will be flying on the island of Hawaii, so for this seed proposal announcement cycle we will welcome requests for
Hawaii.

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