OT Blog
Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
Aug 7, 2011
Community Workshop Announcement:
CHARTING THE FUTURE OF TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNING (TLS) IN THE EARTH SCIENCES AND RELATED FIELDS
This workshop will be held at the Millennium Harvest House Hotel in Boulder, Colorado on October 17-19, 2011.
Workshop registration is now open. To register and apply for support please visit: http://www.unavco.org/community/meetings-events/2011/tls/tls.html
Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS), a.k.a. terrestrial LiDAR, is part of a suite of new geodetic imaging technologies that are becoming increasingly important to the Earth science and related communities for... more
Jul 24, 2011
The Geological Society of America annual meeting abstract deadline of July 26th, 2011 is fast approaching. Below are sessions and short courses at the GSA 2011 meeting in Minneapolis that will focus on lidar data in the Earth sciences:
Topical Sessions:
T114. Measuring the True Shape of the Earth: Quantitative and Qualitative Applications of Terrestrial LiDAR
GSA Archaeological Geology Division; GSA Structural Geology and Tectonics Division; GSA Geoinformatics Division; GSA Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division; GSA Environmental and Engineering Geology Division
Ian P. Madin,... more
Jul 24, 2011
There has been some discussion recently regarding the status of the Death Valley-Fish Lake Valley lidar dataset collected on behalf of Principle Investigator Dr. James Dolan (USC) under the National Science Foundation GeoEarthScope project. These lidar data cover the Death Valley-Fish Lake Valley (DV-FLV) fault system on the California-Nevada border and are the last of the EarthScope funded lidar data to be made available through OpenTopography. The DV‐FLV lidar data were collected by NCALM under the pre‐community driven GeoEarthScope funding structure (GeoEarthScope Lidar... more
Jul 16, 2011
Ian Madin (Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries) and I will be teaching an introductory lidar short course at the 2011 Geological Society of America annual meeting in Minneapolis in October.
Details from the GSA Short Course page:
514. Introduction to the Acquisition, Visualization, and Interpretation of Airborne LiDAR Data
Sat., 8 Oct., 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
$110. Limit: 30. CEU: 0.9.
Cosponsors: OpenTopography; GSA Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division; GSA Structural Geology and Tectonics Division; GSA Environmental and Engineering Geology Division; GSA... more
Jul 6, 2011
We invite you to submit an abstract to the following 2011 American Geophysical Union Meeting session this fall. The deadline for abstract submissions is August 4th.
EP13: High-Resolution Topographic Data Processing, Analysis, and Visualization: Emerging Techniques and Applications
High-resolution topographic data collected via airborne and terrestrial laser scanning (lidar) have stimulated new results in the areas of surface processes, hazards, tectonics, and ecology. However, significant bottlenecks to data access, processing, and analysis remain. This session emphasizes technical... more
Jul 5, 2011
Dr. Kurt Frankel was killed on July 2, 2011 while on a bicycle ride in northern Florida. This is unbelievably tragic and very sad news. Our thoughts and great memories of him go out to his family, friends and colleagues. The memorial below has been distributed via email to the Earth science community by several of his colleagues.
Kurt shared our enthusiasm for tectonics and geomorphology especially when viewed with the fine lens of high-resolution topography. Kurt was an advocate for OpenTopography and was very active in the Earth science lidar community. He organized several high-profile... more
Jun 17, 2011
Dear Colleagues,
We invite you to submit an abstract to the following 2011 AGU Session this Fall, deadline for abstract submissions is 4th August:
T36: New Constraints on Active Fault Zones from Integration of Laser Scanning, Satellite Interferometry and other Earth Imaging Methods
Convergence between geodesy, geospatial, earth imaging and geophysical technologies are enabling new insights into active deformation zones. We invite scientists who are integrating these tools and data sets to investigate active faulting to submit contributions on:- 1. High-resolution fault geometry... more
Jun 15, 2011
Nancy Glenn, director of Idaho State's Boise Center Aerospace Lab (BCAL) and a member of the OpenTopography Advisory Committee, wrote to let us know about a new Idaho LiDAR Consortium website that her group has just released. The website provides links to news about ILC activities, research, and software tools - including the BCAL lidar tools for ENVI. The site provides a nice map interface to view ILC data coverage - including planned data collections - and to download data products such as DEMs for certain datasets.
OpenTopography is working with Nancy to ingest a portion of the ILC... more
Jun 8, 2011
The final piece of the Lake Tahoe Lidar dataset - standard digital elevation model (DEM) and intensity rasters - are now available for download from the OpenTopography standard DEM page. These products, produced by Watershed Sciences, the vendor who performed the Tahoe data collection, consist of three separate data layers all at 0.5 meter resolution in the ERDAS Imagine (.IMG) format:
1. Highest hit DEM
2. Hydro enforced bare earth DEM
3. 8-bit intensity raster
We've packaged the data based on the USGS quarter quadrangle (3.75 minute) naming conventions used by Watershed Sciences (... more
May 4, 2011
As we announced last week, lidar data for the whole Lake Tahoe basin are now available via OpenTopography. Over the past week this dataset has seen a quite a bit of traffic, with over 160 jobs run (10+ billion points processed) by more than 50 unique users. However, our experience indicates that a large number of people just want to look at these data, and processing point cloud data to DEMs is clearly not the most efficient way to go about this. So, as I've done in the past for many of the larger datasets OpenTopography hosts, I ran the whole Tahoe Basin dataset through a routine to... more