Recap: Accessing Haiti Earthquake LiDAR Data

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 be some confusion, here is a quick summary of how to access the publicly available Haiti lidar data products. If you are aware of other pathways to the data leave a comment and I'll update the list.

Point cloud data:

UPDATE August 5th, 2010: OpenTopography is now hosting the full World Bank - ImageCat Inc. - RIT Haiti Earthquake LiDAR point cloud dataset. You can access these data HERE.

Gridded Products (DEMs):

Google Earth Image Overlays:

    Using the gridded World Bank LiDAR data downloaded from the USGS FTP site above, I generated a cache of hillshade imagery and a network linked KML file to access these images in Google Earth. Download of the KML file and more information can be found in this blog post: Haiti LiDAR imagery in Google Earth

NGA ALIRT LiDAR: