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.
The entire San Andreas fault system has now been imaged utilizing GeoEarthScope Northern California Airborne LiDAR Data, along with many other important geologic features, and is available for download via the GEON Portal. This entire dataset is now available as 1 km^2 tiles of 0.5 m digital elevation models - both unfiltered (all data)and filtered (bare earth) in ESRI (ArcGIS) binary grid format. Complete metadata are also now available for download.
