OpenTopography is an effort that facilitates community access to high-resolution, Earth science-oriented, topography data, and related tools and resources.
The OpenTopography Facility is based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego and is operated in collaboration with colleagues in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and at UNAVCO. Its mission is to democratize online access to high-resolution (meter to sub-meter scale), Earth science-oriented, topography data acquired with lidar and other technologies, harness cutting edge cyberinfrastructure to provide Web service-based data access, processing, and analysis capabilities that are scalable, extensible, and innovative, promote discovery of data and software tools through community populated metadata catalogs, partner with public domain data holders to leverage OpenTopography infrastructure for data discovery, hosting and processing, provide professional training and expert guidance in data management, processing, and analysis, and foster interaction and knowledge exchange in the Earth science lidar user community.
As this blog is focused on spatial data, OpenTopography merits attention, as it contains elevation data, Lidar data, bathymetric data, and much more. The site includes an API and even some lessons and tutorials. You can even contribute data that you have gathered to OpenTopography. I have found the data catalog and map interface to be straightforward. The data are delivered in a suitable variety of formats and the goal seems to be helping the end data user.
As a reader of this blog, I think you will find OpenTopography to be a useful resource and I encourage you to keep it in your oft-used bookmarks.
Joseph J. Kerski, Ph.D., GISP | Education Manager, Geographer
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