Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
By Emily Zawacki
Lidar (light detection and ranging) is a common remote sensing technique used to create high-resolution three-dimensional models of landscapes and built features. Lidar uses laser pulses to measure distances to the ground or other features. Traditionally, lidar scanners are mounted to airborne or terrestrial platforms, but we now have the power of lidar in our own hands.
OpenTopography continued to experience strong growth in 2021 with increases in usage (jobs) as well as number of users. At the end of 2021, we have had over 158,047 unique users running 626,973 processing jobs via the portal and over 284,559 unique API users/IPs invoking in excess of 2,578,334 API jobs. We saw double the growth in the number of API calls from an already exponential growth in 2021. We continued to add more topography datasets as well as increased federated access to the number of USGS 3DEP datasets hosted on the cloud.
Topographic differencing shows changes to the Earth’s landscape, vegetation, and the built environment from both natural and anthropogenic processes. Here, we present several examples of topographic differencing in New Zealand that show airplane movement at the Auckland Airport, sediment erosion and deposition along a river on the South Island, and building construction in Wellington. The lidar topography datasets used in these examples are managed by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and are available from OpenTopography.
It is with great sadness that we learned about the passing of Martin Isenburg. We feel this loss deeply and our condolences go to his family and friends.
Nat Quinn, OpenTopography 2021 summer intern
As OpenTopography continues to expand our data catalog, the number of users and jobs to access data have grown considerably. It's very exciting to see such significant growth in use of OpenTopography, but these increases also mean that the computational load on our systems has grown as well. Another exciting trend is that many software programs are now integrating OpenTopography's global data API into their own programs, which has drastically increased the volume of API calls to our servers.
As most OpenTopography users hopefully appreciate, support for OT comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and thus our primary emphasis is on facilitating access to topographic data oriented towards Earth science research. In the context of academic research, publications are the most important metric for measuring impact. The following summary was produced from a review of references to OpenTopography in the published literature using web-based searches of online journal databases.
By Chelsea Scott
