Yesterday, GEON released an updated and redesigned website (http://www.geongrid.org/). As part of the update to the GEON site, we have moved all of the LiDAR topography oriented features previously hosted in the GEON portal to a new website we are calling the OpenTopography Portal (http://opentopography.org/). The OpenTopography site provides the same core LiDAR data access and processing capabilities that were available through GEON, with streamlined access, new features, better opportunities for user discussion, and most importantly, a dedicated online space for users to find high resolution LiDAR topography and related resources. We hope to build upon the new OpenTopography Portal in the coming months with additional datasets, new features, and new collaborations.
You may access OpenTopography directly using the above URL, or via the Topography tab in the GEON website. If you are already a registered user of the GEON LiDAR system, your log in, password and LiDAR job archive have all been seamlessly migrated to the OpenTopography Portal. Simply log in via the “myOpenTopo” page with your GEON Portal username and password.
NEW FEATURES:
- No log in necessary to access the site and to download data. However, if you want to view your LiDAR job archive or take advantage of your elevated processing quota (see below), you must log in.
- Increased point cloud processing quotas for all users. As a registered user, your point cloud processing and download quota has been automatically elevated to 100 million points, from 50 million points. Guests and users who haven’t requested an elevated quota start at 50 million points, rather than 5 million points.
- Google Earth KML files and full-size browse images (jpg format) now automatically generated for all custom DEM jobs. This means that you can quickly overlay a hillshade of your custom DEM in Google Earth as soon as your job is complete.
- More data and formats: We are constantly adding new data to the system. All GeoEarthScope LiDAR data will be available in point cloud, custom DEM, standard DEM tiles, and Google Earth hillshade overlay format.
- New discussion forum and blog to allow users to ask questions, share tips and discoveries, and to stay up to date on relevant information.
- Resources section where we plan to add useful links to software and tools, documentation, and tutorials – this section is still under development so if you have resources you’d like to share please let us know.
We hope that our core users will find the new OpenTopography Portal to be a helpful resource for accessing LiDAR topographic data, tools and information. If you have comments, problems, resources you’d like to share, or are interested in collaborating, please feel free to contact us.