OT Blog

Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences

Introducing API keys for access to OpenTopography global datasets

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.

OT Bibliography 2020 - review of publications using OpenTopography

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.

OT Bibliography 2019 - review of publications using OpenTopography

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.

LINZ tutorial: From points to pixels — creating digital elevation models from OpenTopography point clouds

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.

Topographic Differencing Showcase

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.

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