Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dear Colleagues,
We invite you to submit an abstract to the following 2011 AGU Session this Fall, deadline for abstract submissions is 4th August:
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 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:
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.
Via Joe Wheaton at Utah State comes this announcement on an upcoming workshop he'll be leading on using repeat topographic data to detect geomorphic change.
A relatively common question from OpenTopography users is how they can filter or classify a lidar dataset that was delivered by the data provider without ground (bare earth) returns differentiated from vegetation returns. The B4 lidar dataset, which covers the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto faults is a good example of a dataset where the lack of classification can be problematic for users, especially those working at higher elevations where vegetation can be dense.
