Recap: Accessing Haiti Earthquake LiDAR Data

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:

The World Bank funded data are available from the RIT Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response (IPLER) Haiti earthquake page. Available products include classified point clouds in LAS format and first return (SEM) and bare earth (DEM) terrain models in GeoTIFF formats. From the IPLER Haiti page:


Data can be DOWNLOADED: Anonymous FTP (not an SFTP) using thor.cis.rit.edu OR the WASP HTTP Site

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):

First return (SEM) and bare earth (DEM) terrain models in GeoTIFF formats (derived from the LAS point cloud data) are available via the IPLER Haiti FTP and HTTP sites listed above, or from an FTP site hosted by the USGS that was deployed to host earthquake-related data: http://edcftp.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/disaster/201001_Earthquake_Haiti/

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:

Access to NGA ALIRT LiDAR data are via the NGA Haiti ALIRT page, which provides an overview map of the collection area and a link to download "Geospatial Data Files". Products range from movies and PDF visuals of data to DSMs in GeoTIFF format.