
Complete LiDAR Scan of England Publicly Available - alibarber
https://environmentagency.blog.gov.uk/2015/09/18/laser-surveys-light-up-open-data/
======
hanoz
I took a look at this after it was mentioned on Hacker News two weeks ago and
ended up building this map of all the DSM 1m data:

[https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map](https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map)

I've been quite fascinated to discover how many mysterious lumps and bumps are
to be found all over the country, often with no apparent explanation in aerial
photo maps, and to my great surprise I find myself cultivating an interest in
armchair archaeology. I've stumbled across a few features which on further
research have turned out to be sites of note, a couple of which were only
discovered in recent years, which is quite exciting. Next mission is to
discover something completely unknown. In fact I could do with some help
interpreting some features if anyone here has any experience in this area.

Here's a couple of well known sites:

[https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU1224642189](https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU1224642189)
(Stonehenge)

[https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU1025569962](https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU1025569962)
(Avebury)

A few of my 'discoveries':

[https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=ST5895844810](https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=ST5895844810)
(Medieval and Iron Age/Roman field systems near Croscombe, Somerset)

[https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=NY7217242430](https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=NY7217242430)
(Potential henge near Alston, Cumbria)

[https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SX1025261066](https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SX1025261066)
(Roman Fort near Restormel Castle, Cornwall)

A couple of things I'm not sure about:

[https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=ST4580543091](https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=ST4580543091)

[https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=TL2327777126](https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=TL2327777126)

~~~
scoot
Nice job on the viewer. It would be cool to be able to toggle between (or have
an overlay of) Ordnance Survey (or similar) data on known archeological
features, and a google style aerial view.

Couple this with he ability to post and discuss interesting features, it could
enable the "crowd-sourcing" of topological archeology.

~~~
hanoz
Thank you, yes I should definitely look into adding both those facilities.

In the meantime, it is possible to compare other maps in a clunkier way by
tapping to bring up a link to a variety of other sources via Wikipedia's
GeoHack tool.

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Doctor_Fegg
People have been experimenting with using this to contribute to OpenStreetMap
for a couple of weeks now. Here's one writeup: [http://chris-
osm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/extracting-building-...](http://chris-
osm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/extracting-building-heights-from-lidar.html)

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praseodym
There is a similar dataset available for The Netherlands. A potree point cloud
visualisation can be seen at
[http://ahn2.pointclouds.nl/](http://ahn2.pointclouds.nl/).

~~~
pp19dd
This is amazing. It took awhile to render at the max-zoom level but once the
data loaded (and rendered), the level of detail is just astounding. You can
see a construction crane and its counterweights imaged recognizably. Sagging
power lines, just unbelievable.

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wielebny
LIDAR scans of Poland are available publicly from some time:
[http://geoportal.gov.pl/dane/numeryczne-modele-
wysokosciowe](http://geoportal.gov.pl/dane/numeryczne-modele-wysokosciowe)

~~~
rasz_pl
for a low low price of ~$1/km2 [http://www.codgik.gov.pl/index.php/obsluga-
klienta/oplaty-za...](http://www.codgik.gov.pl/index.php/obsluga-
klienta/oplaty-za-udostepnianie-materialow-fotogrametrycznych.html)

There is some mention of free access, but its behind wall of legal paragraphs
and applications

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JorgeGT
An almost complete LiDAR scan of Spain is also publicly available. I wrote
about it here and included a few samples:
[http://wechoosethemoon.es/2015/09/05/lidar-
espana-3D/](http://wechoosethemoon.es/2015/09/05/lidar-espana-3D/)

Sadly it is in Spanish but I hope available areas and pictures of expected
results are clear enough! LiDAR data is provided as 2 Km x 2 Km squares of
RGB-colored points in *.laz format. If someone is interested I can translate
into English or point to the sources.

~~~
diggan
Hey Jorge, thanks for sharing! I would be interested in a translation, since
I'm based in Barcelona and would love to do some experiments with the data,
focused on Barcelona.

~~~
JorgeGT
I will try to allocate time! Fortunately Barcelona is covered, you just need
to head to this page:
[http://centrodedescargas.cnig.es/CentroDescargas/buscador.do](http://centrodedescargas.cnig.es/CentroDescargas/buscador.do)
(there's an English button on the upper right corner) and select "LiDAR" in
the menu. You can then select by drawing a polygon or uploading a shapefile
and click search. You will be taken to a download page with the files that
intersect your selection =)

Edit: see for example this data in the Barceloneta area I just pulled:
[http://i.imgur.com/ayCK7MC.png](http://i.imgur.com/ayCK7MC.png)

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Tepix
This is amazing. I love that they mention Minecraft as one of the use cases:

"LIDAR data – some surprising uses:"

"Computer games: Minecraft players have requested our LIDAR data to help them
build virtual worlds: the data could be useful to anyone creating realistic 3D
worlds."

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cwal37
If you're interested in LiDAR data from the United states, you should have a
look at this wikipedia page and its corresponding links[0]. Most states have
some kind of data freely available from the most recent survey, although it's
neither uniform or always clear in terms of how to access it. The structure of
the program allowed individual states to tackle their won territory
differently in both surveying and data dissemination, so there's no easy and
official central repo as far as I understand.

I was in grad school at Indiana and working at the geological survey while
they were finalizing some of the state's pieces of this, and it was really
fascinating to see some of the early products some of the people in the
geography and geology departments were producing. I mucked around a bit with
it myself, but never really produced anything useful. I can speak to finding
the data fairly easy to acquire and quite comprehensive at the time, uncertain
if that's changed, but might be a decent starting point[1].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lidar_Dataset_(United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lidar_Dataset_\(United_States\))

[1]
[http://gis.iu.edu/datasetInfo/statewide/in_2011.php](http://gis.iu.edu/datasetInfo/statewide/in_2011.php)

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joosters
Can anyone recommend any 3d viewing programs for this data? This is all new to
me but I'd love to try experimenting with it. The download zipfiles contain
.asc files

~~~
JorgeGT
I use the freely available FugroViewer, and manipulate the data with LAStools.
If they are ASCII files you can use any program like python with matplotlib to
make a 3D plot.

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alphapapa
I was hoping to find some explanation of how they capture the data. I'm
guessing it's from aircraft? It'd be interesting to read about how they stitch
together and correct the data captured from a moving platform like that. And I
wonder how long it takes to capture the whole country.

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NickHaflinger
'All 11 terabytes of our LIDAR data (that’s roughly equivalent to 2,750,000
MP3 songs)' or a stack of paper 513 kilometers high :)

~~~
Cthulhu_
[pedantic]Using what encoding, font, font size, margins, etc? [/pedantic]

~~~
david-given
Paper's about 0.1mm thick. Therefore 513km of paper contains approximately
5.13 billion sheets.

Given that there's 11TB of data, that means that each sheet contains about
2360 bytes. (Printing on one side.) That's an 80x30 grid. A4 is 210x297mm, so
(holding the paper landscape for convenience and assuming a 2cm margin) that
makes for 3.5x6.3mm letters. Different encodings give you slightly different
sized letters, but it's all roughly the same.

So I'd guess around 10 to 11 point.

Has this helped?

~~~
Caprinicus
They aren't effectively using their paper then.

~~~
nly
So... what is the most dense, reliably machine readable, format that can be
printed on ordinary paper with a consumer inkjet?

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deskamess
Any idea about the cost of doing a LIDAR scan for a region? Lets say you have
1200 square km (assume rectangular area). How much would that cost?

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Schwolop
At one point in time[1], I hired a helicopter to act as a surrogate remote
sensor doing data fusion with a ground robot. I flew as a passenger and told
the pilot where to fly based on the ground robot's need for data.

Since we had to pay for the helicopter's time anyway, and the field trial was
spread over two days, we left our equipment attached to the helicopter when it
returned to its airfield that night. The next day we had a 78km long data set
of LIDAR, GPS, visual imaging, and inertial measures, all from an altitude of
about 25m giving us about +/\- 2mm for the LIDAR's range data.

The sad end to this anecdote is that I have no idea what happened to that
data. It's presumably sitting on a dusty server somewhere in academia.

[1] This point in time, as it happens:
[http://www.drtomallen.com/uploads/1/2/0/2/12026356/3361016_o...](http://www.drtomallen.com/uploads/1/2/0/2/12026356/3361016_orig.jpg)

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dougbinks
Format of the data is listed as Arc/Info ASCII Grid (AAIGrid) which is an
ASCII Esri grid
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esri_grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esri_grid).

------
JonnieCache
Hell yes! This will be useful in my long term aim of procedurally generating
rolling english hills for video game purposes...

EDIT: with the resolution of this thing, maybe I won't need to generate them,
maybe I can just set the game in the real england...

~~~
hahainternet
You don't need this data to do that. OSM already releases everything you need
including gridded height data and vector building maps.

I've used that data for this exact purpose before. Shoot me a message
explaining what you're looking for.

~~~
JonnieCache
Thanks. You don't have an email in your profile though. The one in the email
field is just for HN itself to contact you, you have to put it in the `about`
field for other people to see it.

EDIT: my email is in my profile, so hit me up if you dont want to expose
yours.

~~~
hahainternet
Hey, I did, might be caught by spam given I have a terribly hacked up MX :D

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bsykora
LIDAR is also being used at NASA to measure atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

[http://decadal.gsfc.nasa.gov/ascends.html](http://decadal.gsfc.nasa.gov/ascends.html)

[PDF][http://esto.nasa.gov/conferences/estf2011/presentations/Absh...](http://esto.nasa.gov/conferences/estf2011/presentations/Abshire_ESTF2011.pdf)

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groth
Anyone know how burial mounds/roman roads are found? Would love to see that
reproduced for the non-academic world.

~~~
toyg
Basically you look for shapes. Usually you start from some vague idea,
documents describing stuff that should be there, and then you look for shapes
that look too peculiar for nature alone. See Portus for an example: natural
ponds are not usually hexagonal...

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chatman
This will be great as a base layer in OSM!

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Animats
Do they have "first and last" LIDAR data, or just one value per point? It's
common to capture the distance to both the first and the last reflection. This
often indicates the top of vegetation and the ground level. With that, you can
easily identify trees, brush, and crops.

~~~
tgb
Neat. I was wondering about that.

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scuba7183
Awesome! Does anyone know if similar resources for the US are available?

Edit: possibly [https://lta.cr.usgs.gov/LIDAR](https://lta.cr.usgs.gov/LIDAR)
Still looking for more

~~~
sliverstorm
This tutorial will direct you to download DEM data for the US:

[http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tutorials/how-to-create-
garmin-t...](http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tutorials/how-to-create-garmin-topo-
maps---part-2---elevation-data/)

The map viewer you use:

[http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/](http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/)

Info about the elevation data you get:

[http://nationalmap.gov/3DEP/3dep_prodserv.html](http://nationalmap.gov/3DEP/3dep_prodserv.html)

The data is kind of buried, but I went through this process for building maps
and it appears to be very high quality.

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tibbon
Could do some neat things with drone piloting with this.

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vanous
Does anyone know of publicly available LIDAR data for the Czech Republic?

