OT Blog
Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
Jun 22, 2022
by Emily Zawacki and Chelsea Scott
OpenTopography provides high-quality and ready-to-use educational resources that facilitate integrating high resolution topography into classroom lessons and activities at a variety of levels. With these resources and exercises, students use cutting-edge technology related to high resolution topography to learn about geologic processes. These resources include laboratory and classroom exercises for undergraduate and graduate courses, pre-generated lidar products of landforms, including files for 3D printing, an introduction to lidar, and Jupyter notebooks... more
Jun 9, 2022
By Emily Zawacki
OpenTopography is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation to facilitate access to topographic data for Earth and other scientific research and education. We closely track peer-reviewed publications that utilize OpenTopography data and services as they are an important measure of our impact. To better highlight new results that demonstrate the use and reuse of OpenTopography data and processing, we will periodically be featuring new results in a blog post.
Have a new paper out that uses data or services provided by OpenTopography and want us to highlight it... more
Mar 13, 2022
Primary support for OpenTopography comes from the Division of Earth Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation, and thus, our principal emphasis is on facilitating access to topographic data oriented towards Earth science research. In the context of academic research, publications are a crucial metric for measuring impact and sustaining support for initiatives such as OpenTopography. We actively monitor references to OpenTopography in the published literature using web-based searches of online journal databases, and annually compile this information for our use and for the benefit... more
Jan 12, 2022
By Emily Zawacki
Lidar (light detection and ranging) is a common remote sensing technique used to create high-resolution three-dimensional models of landscapes and built features. Lidar uses laser pulses to measure distances to the ground or other features. Traditionally, lidar scanners are mounted to airborne or terrestrial platforms, but we now have the power of lidar in our own hands.
Apple’s latest products, the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, and iPad Pro now feature a built-in lidar scanner that can create 3D representations of close-range objects (up to 5 m... more
Jan 6, 2022
OpenTopography continued to experience strong growth in 2021 with increases in usage (jobs) as well as number of users. At the end of 2021, we have had over 158,047 unique users running 626,973 processing jobs via the portal and over 284,559 unique API users/IPs invoking in excess of 2,578,334 API jobs. We saw double the growth in the number of API calls from an already exponential growth in 2021. We continued to add more topography datasets as well as increased federated access to the number of USGS 3DEP datasets hosted on the cloud.
More detailed real time analytics are available from... more
Dec 12, 2021
By Emily Zawacki
Monitoring the stability of the coastline in San Diego County, California is of significant interest given the number of cliff collapses in recent years and the high housing and infrastructure density along the coast. There is particular concern for the future, as climate change and rising sea levels are likely to accelerate coastal erosion.
At the very end of 2020, there was a bluff collapse within the Torrey Pines community in San Diego caught on video by beachgoers, a part of cliff collapsed in Del Mar in early 2021 near a stretch of train tracks, and in 2019... more
Dec 12, 2021
A growing subset of OpenTopography users are accessing data for use in various 3D modeling software environments.
To better support this user community, OpenTopography prepared a new Jupyter notebook to allow users to subset or thin dense point cloud datasets using a voxel grid, triangulate the new dataset to create a surface mesh, and export the mesh as an .STL file that can be opened in a variety of 3D modeling software. This notebook was prepared by summer 2021 OpenTopography USIP intern Nathaniel Quinn.
Due to the very high point density of lidar, thinning the raw point cloud data is... more
Oct 19, 2021
Topographic differencing shows changes to the Earth’s landscape, vegetation, and the built environment from both natural and anthropogenic processes. Here, we present several examples of topographic differencing in New Zealand that show airplane movement at the Auckland Airport, sediment erosion and deposition along a river on the South Island, and building construction in Wellington. The lidar topography datasets used in these examples are managed by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and are available from OpenTopography.
As organizations continue to invest in collecting high... more
Sep 14, 2021
It is with great sadness that we learned about the passing of Martin Isenburg. We feel this loss deeply and our condolences go to his family and friends.
Martin was a giant in the field of lidar and topographic data processing. His “fast tools to catch reality” (rapidlasso) LAStools were powerful and widely used throughout the lidar industry. They liberated us to be able to quickly and easily process LAS point cloud files produced from laser scanning and photogrammetry. His tools were easy to use; they worked and scaled; and they drove standards and became the foundation of countless lidar... more
Aug 17, 2021
Nat Quinn, OpenTopography 2021 summer intern
Recently, OpenTopography has seen considerable growth in users leveraging our data combined with tools such as rayshader, an open source package for producing 2D and 3D data visualizations in the R software environment, to create beautiful visualizations of landscapes. We didn't want to miss out on the fun, so we created a Jupyter Notebook (also available in RStudio format) for OpenTopography users to explore and learn about rayshader. The rayshader package utilizes a combination of raytracing, hillshading methods, and overlay imagery to... more