OT Blog

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

LINZ tutorial: From points to pixels — creating digital elevation models from OpenTopography point clouds

OpenTopography is collaborating with Land Information New Zealand to make 3D point cloud lidar data in New Zealand available for download, processing, and visualization. LIdar-derived DEM and DSM raster products are available for download via the LINZ Data Service. LINZ recently published another nice tutorial on how to use OpenTopography tools to produce custom raster terrain products (i.e., DEMs, DTMs, and DSMs) from LINZ point cloud data.

Topographic Differencing Showcase

OpenTopography recently released on-demand vertical differencing. Here, we showcase a range of anthropogenic, geomorphic, and tectonic processes imaged using topographic differencing on OpenTopography’s portal. In each image, erosion or downward change of the Earth’s surface is colored in red, while deposition or upward change is colored in blue. We include a link to the change detection page for each dataset pair so you can run your own jobs and explore.

LINZ tutorial: Creating point cloud visualizations with OpenTopography

OpenTopography is collaborating with Land Information New Zealand to make 3D point cloud lidar data in New Zealand available for download, processing, and visualization. LIdar-derived DEM and DSM raster products are available for download via the LINZ Data Service. Today, LINZ published a very nice tutorial on how to use OpenTopography tools to produce a 3D, interactive, browser-based point cloud visualisation.

Geomorphometry 2018

The 5th International Conference of the International Society for Geomorphometry - Geomorphometry 2018 - August 13–17, 2018 in Boulder, CO, USA

ABSTRACTS due:
15 March 2018 via EasyChair. More information on abstract submission at: http://2018.geomorphometry.org/

THEMES include but are not limited to:

Geologic Applications of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) at GSA Meeting, Flagstaff, AZ, 2018

We are pleased to announce an unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) theme session and short courses at the Geological Society of America Joint Section Cordilleran & Rocky Mountain Meeting in Flagstaff, AZ, May 14-17, 2018

TECHNICAL SESSION (abstract deadline Feb 20th, 2018):

T25. Geologic Applications of Unmanned Aerial Systems.

Intro to High Resolution Topography and 3D Imaging (TLS & SfM) at GSA 2017

At the 2017 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting (in Seattle, WA, October 20-25, 2017), UNAVCO in collaboration with OpenTopography will be offering a pair of one-day introductory short courses on High Resolution Topography and 3D Imaging. The Friday course will focus on terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), while the Saturday course will cover structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry.

OpenTopography: 2016 in Review Infographic

OpenTopography had a great year in 2016, with continued strong growth in number of users and jobs run to access and process data. We've also continued to add data and successfully renewed OpenTopography funding from the US National Science Foundation. The infographic below summarizes various OpenTopography metrics from 2016 to illustrate use of the system in the past year.

TauDEM processing on OpenTopography

Topographic rasters produced from OpenTopography's high-resolution point clouds can be used in tandem with TauDEM, an open source analysis toolkit by Dr. David Tarboton at Utah State University, to extract hydrologic information from topography. TauDEM can perform calculations such as flow direction and area contributing to a point within the hydrologic network.

OpenTopography: 2015 in Review Infographic

OpenTopography had a big year in 2015, and we continue to see exponential growth in number of users and jobs run to access and process data in 2015. We compiled metrics from the past year into this infographic to summarize OpenTopography use in 2015.

We look forward to another year of growth in users and available data in 2016!

The OT Bibliography: a review of publications using OpenTopography

As most OpenTopography users hopefully appreciate, primary 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 perhaps the most important metric for measuring impact.

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