Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
At the 2017 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting (in Seattle, WA, October 20-25, 2017), UNAVCO in collaboration with OpenTopography will be offering a pair of one-day introductory short courses on High Resolution Topography and 3D Imaging. The Friday course will focus on terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), while the Saturday course will cover structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry.
OpenTopography had a great year in 2016, with continued strong growth in number of users and jobs run to access and process data. We've also continued to add data and successfully renewed OpenTopography funding from the US National Science Foundation. The infographic below summarizes various OpenTopography metrics from 2016 to illustrate use of the system in the past year.
Topographic rasters produced from OpenTopography's high-resolution point clouds can be used in tandem with TauDEM, an open source analysis toolkit by Dr. David Tarboton at Utah State University, to extract hydrologic information from topography. TauDEM can perform calculations such as flow direction and area contributing to a point within the hydrologic network.
OpenTopography had a big year in 2015, and we continue to see exponential growth in number of users and jobs run to access and process data in 2015. We compiled metrics from the past year into this infographic to summarize OpenTopography use in 2015.
We look forward to another year of growth in users and available data in 2016!
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 perhaps the most important metric for measuring impact.
Structure from Motion (SfM) utilizes overlapping images to construct 3D models and is quickly gaining momentum as a low-cost and efficient technique to acquire high resolution topography. In this short video Ramon Arrowsmith (Arizona State University), part of the OpenTopography leadership team, provides an introduction to SfM.
Recently, an OpenTopography team member had an opportunity to assist NCALM with their Seed grants campaign in October 2014. She was awarded a NCALM student Seed grant in winter 2014 and the data collection occurred in Fall 2014. This year's campaign included areas of Idaho, Montana, Colorado, California and Utah.
This summer three San Diego high school students interned for OpenTopography as part of the Research Experience for High School Students (REHS) program at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD. The students primarily worked on analysis of anonymized user behavior data as well as data usage patterns to identify relationships and trends in OpenTopography system use.
Members of the OpenTopography team are co-convening a session at the fall 2014 American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco:
AGU Session #3486: High-resolution topography for analyzing Earth-surface dynamics
The 2014 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting (in Vancouver, BC, Canada, October 18-22, 2014) short course program is now live. For the fifth year in a row, UNAVCO will be offering a one-day introduction to terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) short course.
