OpenTopography has released another batch of Northern California GeoEarthScope point cloud data. This release means that in addition to the full set of tile DEMs and the Google Earth-viewable hillshades, approximately 85% of the Northern California LiDAR point cloud data are accessible via OpenTopography. New regions available in this release include:
OpenTopography team members at SDSC have received a new grant from the National Science Foundation to explore new ways for academic researchers to manage extremely large data sets hosted on massive, Internet-based commercial computer clusters, or what have become known as computing “clouds". This research will use the LiDAR topography data hosted by OpenTopography as a test case and will focus on how cloud computing can aid the management and processing of massive spatial data sets.
We are pleased to announce an updated version of the Northern California GeoEarthScope LiDAR in Google Earth capability that offers significantly improved browsing performance. This update features the same data as available in previous releases but achieves faster data loading in Google Earth through an updated image processing approach. In order to experience the improved performance it is necessary to download a new KMZ file.
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/).
Another round of GeoEarthScope LiDAR data is now available via OpenTopography. The much anticipated Garlock fault portion of the Southern & Eastern California acquisition can now be downloaded via OpenTopography in Google Earth hillshade overlay and standard tiled DEM formats. The full data release announcement:
We are pleased to announce the availability of new GeoEarthScope airborne LiDAR data products from the Southern/Eastern California project! This release includes full coverage of the Garlock fault.
David Phillips, GeoEarthScope Project Manager, distributed an email announcement today about the Google Earth Northern California GeoEarthScope LiDAR hillshades that are available via OpenTopography:
We are pleased to announce the beta release of the OpenTopography Portal. We are still actively working to refine the user interface and navigation, and add content to the pages, but the core functionality of the system is ready and stable. For those of you that have used the GEON LiDAR Workflow running inside the GEON Portal, OpenTopography will be familiar.
GEON is responsible for the distribution of GeoEarthScope LiDAR data. We will be hosting a demo in the EarthScope booth at GSA next week to highlight access to data, Google Earth visualizations, and the OpenTopography Portal:
EarthScope Animations and Geovisualizations
Geological Society of America 2008 Annual Meeting
Houston, Texas, October 6-7
The 4th International Topo-Europe Meeting will be held October 5-7, 2008, in Madrid, Spain. The aim of this meeting Is to provide an open forum for science on the feedbacks between deep Earth and surface processes. Chaitan Baru will attend and present a talk on GEON, on October 6th.
GEON, in collaboration with the USGS, has developed a Google Earth file (KMZ) that provides access to 1 meter resolution bare earth hillshades from the Northern California GeoEarthScope LiDAR topography dataset. By downloading this file and opening it in Google Earth, users are able to browse hillshades with two illumination angles (315 and 45 degrees) for faults in the northern San Andreas fault system. The Google Earth file remotely accesses data stored on GEON servers to allow users to seamlessly browse the full NoCal dataset from within Google Earth.
