OT Blog
Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
Jun 21, 2010
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:
Jun 21, 2010
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... more
Jun 7, 2010
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... more
May 24, 2010
TLS session at the 2010 Geological Society of America Meeting in Denver, CO announced. Via the GEOMORPHLIST:
Dear Colleague-
With apologies for cross-posting, I encourage you to submit abstracts for Session T.125 Terrestrial Laser Scanning: Applications in Geology and Geomorphology at GSA 2010 in Denver, Colorado. This session is co-sponsored by the GSA Engineering Geology Division and the GSA Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division.
Contributions describing the applications of this technology, as well as discussions of critical issues associated with the implementation of TLS to... more
May 5, 2010
Thanks to a close collaboration with OpenTopography colleague Alejandro Hinojosa at CICESE in Ensenada, Mexico, we have obtained 5 meter resolution LiDAR topography data for the epicentral region of the Sunday, April 4th 2010 magnitude 7.2 El Mayor - Cucapah earthquake in northern Baja, Mexico. These data, which cover an area of over 2,000 square kilometers southwest of Mexicali, were acquired in 2006 by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI), a Mexican government agency. We've been told that these data were collected from an elevation of 6000 m with GSD... more
May 4, 2010
Thanks to the ASU Capstone team - a group of senior undergraduate School of Computing and Informatics students at Arizona State supervised by OpenTopography Co-I Ramon Arrowsmith - we now have a very nice video tutorial on how to use OpenTopography to download and process LiDAR point cloud data to digital elevation models:
This is the first of what we hope will be a series of instructional videos that will appear on the OpenTopography Tutorials page and the OpenTopography YouTube channel. Stay tuned for more soon.
May 1, 2010
OpenTopography received the following information about this upcoming event in Boise via email today. The conference theme is "Light Detection and Ranging laser technology (LiDAR) to plan for, mitigate and solve public safety issues" and the list of topics looks interesting. Details in the announcement below:
On Thursday, June 17th the Southwest Idaho Geographic Information System (GIS) Users Group (SWIG) is holding its Summer 2010 Regional Conference at the University of Idaho's Water Center Room 162, at 322 East Front Street, Boise Idaho 83702 from 9:00am to 5:00pm. The event is FREE.... more
Apr 12, 2010
The University of Houston put out a press release today - National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping Comes to Houston - announcing that one half of the NSF-supported NCALM LiDAR mapping center has moved to UH (the other half of NCALM remains at University of California, Berkley). Formerly at University of Florida, NCALM acquires high-resolution topographic data for NSF-researchers. OpenTopography has worked closely with NCALM on a number of projects, most notably the EarthScope LiDAR project where data were collected by NCALM and are hosted for community access by OpenTopography.
Read the... more
Apr 6, 2010
Another new LiDAR data collection funded with stimulus dollars that I recently became aware of is the ARRA Golden Gate LiDAR Project. Led by San Francisco State University and funded by USGS ARRA, this project will collect data in coastal regions around San Francisco:
The project extent is based upon the watershed boundaries for all watersheds that contain the lands of Marin County and San Francisco County. It also includes the watersheds that contain Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The area of interest includes watersheds that are also located... more
Apr 5, 2010
A proposal for an extensive LiDAR collection of coastal regions of the Northeastern U.S. (New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine) has been funded by the USGS with American Reinvestment and Recovery Act money. The proposal, led by the Maine Office of GIS, is to collect LiDAR data over ~13,500 square miles. MEGIS has an announcement about the funding. From the LiDAR for the Northeast proposal (PDF):
Full or partial county lidar collections for all coastal areas in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, including... more