Information and discussion related to high-resolution lidar topography for the Earth sciences
Dr. Kurt Frankel was killed on July 2, 2011 while on a bicycle ride in northern Florida. This is unbelievably tragic and very sad news. Our thoughts and great memories of him go out to his family, friends and colleagues. The memorial below has been distributed via email to the Earth science community by several of his colleagues.
Dear Colleagues,
We invite you to submit an abstract to the following 2011 AGU Session this Fall, deadline for abstract submissions is 4th August:
Nancy Glenn, director of Idaho State's Boise Center Aerospace Lab (BCAL) and a member of the OpenTopography Advisory Committee, wrote to let us know about a new Idaho LiDAR Consortium website that her group has just released.
The final piece of the Lake Tahoe Lidar dataset - standard digital elevation model (DEM) and intensity rasters - are now available for download from the OpenTopography standard DEM page. These products, produced by Watershed Sciences, the vendor who performed the Tahoe data collection, consist of three separate data layers all at 0.5 meter resolution in the ERDAS Imagine (.IMG) format:
As we announced last week, lidar data for the whole Lake Tahoe basin are now available via OpenTopography. Over the past week this dataset has seen a quite a bit of traffic, with over 160 jobs run (10+ billion points processed) by more than 50 unique users.
Via Joe Wheaton at Utah State comes this announcement on an upcoming workshop he'll be leading on using repeat topographic data to detect geomorphic change.
A relatively common question from OpenTopography users is how they can filter or classify a lidar dataset that was delivered by the data provider without ground (bare earth) returns differentiated from vegetation returns. The B4 lidar dataset, which covers the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto faults is a good example of a dataset where the lack of classification can be problematic for users, especially those working at higher elevations where vegetation can be dense.
This well done ~10 minute video from Oregon Public Broadcasting's Field Guide does an excellent job of highlighting the various earth science applications for the lidar data being collected by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries' (DOGAMI)
Erin Dimaggio, an ASU grad student working in part with OT Co-I Ramon Arrowsmith, has just announced an education and outreach project - SciNews - that she is working on as part of her ASU/NASA Space Grant.
The USGS has released a beautiful poster of Mount St. Helens created from high-resolution LiDAR topography data. The poster is USGS General Information Product 116 and is freely available for download in PDF format at either 17x22 inches or 32x42 inches.
