GEON

Topographic Data in GEON

High resolution topogrpahic data from airborne and terrestrial LiDAR sensors as well as space-based instruments such as ASTER are central to addressing scientific questions such as:

How does the earth’s topography result from the interaction of geomorphic and tectonic processes?  What are effective geomorphic transport laws? How can we use changes in the earth’s surface to determine types and rates of active processes?

Fortunately, over the past decade there has been dramatic growth in the acquisition of publicly funded high-resolution topographic and bathymetric data for scientific, environmental, engineering and planning purposes.  Developing tools to improve access and to provide web-based processing of these data is a central focus of the GEON Project.  GEON has a number of ongoing projects and collaborations that address topographic data:

• OpenTopography Portal - a GEON initiative to build an online system that provides integrated access to high-resolution topographic data, web-based processing tools, and enables the user community to share knowledge, experiences and resources.


• INTERFACE - funded by NSF to help geoscientists in obtaining high resolution and precision, 3D surface data.  GEON will be building upon our existing topographic data capability to incorporate INTERFACE TLS topographic data in the OpenTopography Portal.


• GEO Grid - GEON is collaborating with our colleagues at AIST, Japan to allow interoperability between GEON and GEO Grid catalogs so that users will have seamless access ASTER imagery and DEM data that is readily available in the GEO Grid system.