Earth science educators at the community college and undergraduate level are invited to participate in a workshop to be held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, August 5-7, 2009 on utilizing high-resolution topography and the OpenTopography Portal in the classroom.
We are pleased to announce the availability of new GeoEarthScope airborne LiDAR data products from the Intermountain Seismic Belt (ISB) project! This release includes high resolution LiDAR topography data collected in tectonically active regions of Utah and Wyoming, including Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and the Nephi segment (southern strand) of the Wasatch fault. These LiDAR data can be explored and downloaded in several ways:
NSF has issued a press release highlighting their recent funding in support of cloud computing activities (via the NSF Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program).
OpenTopography has released the final round of Northern California GeoEarthScope point cloud data. This release means that all point cloud and tile DEMs for the Northern California data set are now available for download via OpenTopography. New regions available in this release include:
A feature article entitled Illuminating Northern California’s Active Faults appeared in the February 17, 2009 issue of Eos, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. The article highlights northern California GeoEarthScope LIDAR topography as well as access to those data via the OpenTopography Portal.
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/).