OpenTopography updates: enhanced site search, increased limits, USIEI

OpenTopography is pleased to announce the release of a number of updates and improvements to the OpenTopography system. This release adds several new features to enhance data discovery, processing, and site usability.

Release Notes:

In addition to bug fixes and minor updates, this release includes the following features:

Enhanced site search

The new all-in-one search box allows the user to search data, tools, and site content. The data and site searches were previously in separate locations. You can now search metadata for over 200 datasets and 50 tools, in addition to OpenTopography's archived news, blogs, faqs, and training documents all in one place.

Increased Power User data access limits

The maximum point cloud size for downloading and processing has been increased to 500 million and 350 millions points, respectively, for Power Users.

US Interagency Elevation Inventory (USIEI) integration

OpenTopography has integrated the US Interagency Elevation Inventory into the OT "Find Data" page under the "Data Sources" table of contents. Maintained by NOAA and the USGS, the USIEI is a comprehensive, nationwide listing of known high-accuracy topographic and bathymetric data for the United States, and is a valuable resource for identifying publicly available data. The USIEI in OT will be updated automatically on a weekly basis.

Show/hide advanced processing tools

To streamline the OT processing interface, registered users can now choose to hide advanced processing tools such as the "Hydrologic Terrain Analysis Products" service based on the Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Models (TauDEM) software. TauDEM is "a suite of tools for the extraction and analysis of hydrologic information from topography", but it is an infrequently used tool by many users, so we now offer the ability to hide it from your OT processing workflow. Registered users can activate/deactive the Hydrologic Terrain Analysis tools by going to MyOpenTopo and clicking "Update Profile / Change Password / Enable Services". TauDEM tools are found under the "Advanced Processing Services" tab.