USGS | 3DEP LidarExplorer

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USGS | 3DEP LidarExplorer

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https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/LidarE ... dex.html#/

About This Application
The LidarExplorer was originally created to enable identification of lidar projects having 3D visualization enabled (via Entwine) and having Amazon AWS cloud access. Now that all of the USGS Lidar products are available in the Cloud and 3D visualization is being enabled for all projects, these original requirements have been satisfied.

Moving forward this application will bring together the necessary information for discovering and understanding the underlying 3DEP elevation data and provide avenues for efficiently processing the data within the cloud to avoid the need to download and process data locally. Users will be able to define their area of interest, select and filter products based on needs, create processing pipelines for transforming the data into derived products or results and execute the processing using within-cloud processing capabilities.

Entwine Point Tiles and Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL)
As datasts become larger, downloading data quickly becomes a bottleneck. A number of new developments are addressing this issue.

In January 2019, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Open Data Registry made available a public resource for a large collection of USGS 3DEP Lidar Point Cloud data which had been processed and formatted by Hobu, Inc in the Entwine Point Tiles (EPT) format. This allows public access to Lidar data in an optimized format suitable for direct use by visualization and transformation applications!

USGS Entwine 3D Visualization Site: https://usgs.entwine.io/

The Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL) is capable of reading and translating Entwine Point Tiles (EPT) data directly from it's cloud location using spatially accelerated queries to minimize data transfer. PDAL is capable of analysing, clipping, reprojecting, and translating the source data using a simple JSON formatted set of instructions that form a "pipeline" of stages and operations to perform.

PDAL is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. See: PDAL Quickstart for specific instructions for setting up PDAL in your own local environment.

Within-Cloud Processing
Local Desktop or Workstation processing capability is costly to procure and maintain. The Cloud offers users a very large compute environment that can be scaled up and down as needed to meet changing demands while only paying for the compute time actually used.

The ultimate goal of the LidarExplorer is to allow users to:

fully discover the available 3DEP data,
construct processing pipelines for analysing and transforming the data into derived outputs and
execute the processing pipelines within the cloud.
Experimental PDAL processing features can be turned on by navigating to the Options page and clicking the checkbox next to Enable Processing Options.
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