OT Blog
Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
May 20, 2021
As OpenTopography continues to expand our data catalog, the number of users and jobs to access data have grown considerably. It's very exciting to see such significant growth in use of OpenTopography, but these increases also mean that the computational load on our systems has grown as well. Another exciting trend is that many software programs are now integrating OpenTopography's global data API into their own programs, which has drastically increased the volume of API calls to our servers. To better manage this increased load, OpenTopography has implemented API authorization keys for access... more
Apr 22, 2021
Leveraging the Power of COGs
OpenTopography strives to provide a variety of access methods to our datasets to address the varying needs of our users. While most users access data through the OpenTopography web map interface, others prefer to programmatically access data from our cloud-based bulk storage.
To facilitate programmatic access to cloud-based data, we have recently converted our entire catalog of global topographic data to Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs). COGs are quickly becoming a standard format for hosting raster data in the cloud due to the optimized file structure to... more
Mar 1, 2021
As most OpenTopography users hopefully appreciate, support for OT comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and thus our primary emphasis is on facilitating access to topographic data oriented towards Earth science research. In the context of academic research, publications are the most important metric for measuring impact. The following summary was produced from a review of references to OpenTopography in the published literature using web-based searches of online journal databases.
Since 2009, OpenTopography data and compute services have enabled:
477 peer-reviewed... more
May 29, 2020
By Chelsea Scott
OpenTopography is happy to announce the release of a new vertical differencing tool for performing change detection of multitemporal topography data. This release is the latest in a growing set of tools developed by OpenTopography for measuring natural and anthropogenic surface change with high resolution topography. We now have enabled on-demand differencing of point cloud and raster data for over 50 dataset pairs that show processes including urban growth, vegetation change, landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and sand dune migration.
The new vertical... more
Feb 6, 2020
By Chelsea Scott
OpenTopography is happy to announce the release of our new on-demand 3D differencing tool. With our vertical differencing tool released last year these topographic differencing tools take advantage of the growing set of multi-temporal datasets hosted by OpenTopography and technological advances in measuring surface change from high resolution topography. These tools offer the opportunity to measure ground surface changes over time due to a range of natural and anthropogenic processes from over 45 dataset pairs.
Our 3D differencing capability is the latest offering... more
Jan 28, 2020
As most OpenTopography users hopefully appreciate, primary support for OT comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and thus our primary emphasis is on facilitating access to topographic data oriented towards Earth science research. In the context of academic research, publications are the most important metric for measuring impact. In 2019 we enhanced how we track publications to better understand and communicate how the open and easy access to topography data provided by OT enables scholarly work.
The following summary was produced from a review of references to OpenTopography in... more
Jun 17, 2019
OpenTopography is collaborating with Land Information New Zealand to make 3D point cloud lidar data in New Zealand available for download, processing, and visualization. LIdar-derived DEM and DSM raster products are available for download via the LINZ Data Service. LINZ recently published another nice tutorial on how to use OpenTopography tools to produce custom raster terrain products (i.e., DEMs, DTMs, and DSMs) from LINZ point cloud data.
For the full tutorial please visit this post:
From points to pixels — creating digital elevation models from... more
May 28, 2019
OpenTopography recently released on-demand vertical differencing. Here, we showcase a range of anthropogenic, geomorphic, and tectonic processes imaged using topographic differencing on OpenTopography’s portal. In each image, erosion or downward change of the Earth’s surface is colored in red, while deposition or upward change is colored in blue. We include a link to the change detection page for each dataset pair so you can run your own jobs and explore.
2018 Kilauea, Hawaii, Volcanic eruption: The Kilauea Volcano erupted from May to August 2018 along Kilauea’s east rift zone and... more
Oct 16, 2018
OpenTopography is collaborating with Land Information New Zealand to make 3D point cloud lidar data in New Zealand available for download, processing, and visualization. LIdar-derived DEM and DSM raster products are available for download via the LINZ Data Service. Today, LINZ published a very nice tutorial on how to use OpenTopography tools to produce a 3D, interactive, browser-based point cloud visualisation.
For the full tutorial please visit this post:
Creating point cloud visualisations with OpenTopography
(image credit = LINZ Data Service)
Feb 14, 2018
The 5th International Conference of the International Society for Geomorphometry - Geomorphometry 2018 - August 13–17, 2018 in Boulder, CO, USA
ABSTRACTS due:
15 March 2018 via EasyChair. More information on abstract submission at: http://2018.geomorphometry.org/
THEMES include but are not limited to:
Use of Digital Elevation, Terrain and Surface Models and Canopy Heigh Models in hydrological modeling and biogeography
Acquisition and processing of high resolution elevation data collected with LIDAR and photogrammetry (structure from motion)
Mapping and analyzing... more