OpenTopography

@opentopography.org

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Open access to high-resolution, Earth science-oriented topography data, and related tools & resources. US National Science Foundation supported. #lidar https://www.opentopography.org

A Digital Terrain Model (DTM) of a section of the Congo River basin. The DTM is colored by elevation and draped on a hillshade generated from the Global Ensemble Digital Terrain Model (GEDTM).
Promotional graphic for a short course titled Multi-Temporal Topographic Analysis of Natural Hazards Using OpenTopography at the 2026 CLaSH Annual Meeting, September 23, 2026, in Boulder, Colorado. The design features a light gray topographic contour background and a red-and-blue elevation change map along the bottom.
3D Point cloud colored by intensity of sediment transport into Summer Lake in Oregon.
Screenshot of OpenTopography homepage with text "Card Sorting UI/UX Study: Help improve the OpenTopography platform."
Digital Terrain Model over Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
Graphic advertising dates and titles of OpenTopography's Spring 2026 Webinar Series held on March 18 and 25, and April 1 and 8 at 1 pm ET.
Plot from 2009 to 2025 showing growth of OpenTopography cited in peer-reviewed publications by science domain.
Graphic advertising OpenTopography's Spring 2026 Webinar Series, taking place Wednesday, March-April, 2026 at 1 pm ET/10 am PT.
Banner reading “Seeking New OpenTopography Advisory Committee Members” over a colorful REM showing a winding river, with the OpenTopography logo in the corner.
Lidar point cloud colored by intensity of the neighborhood destroyed by the Eaton Fire.
Event flyer for the San Diego Supercomputer Center Women in High Performance Computing Professional Speaker Series featuring Dr. Chelsea Scott and Dr. Cassandra Brigham, titled “Topographic change with OpenTopography,” with date Wednesday, February 25, 2026, 1:00–2:00 pm PST, over a shaded relief topography background.
Cassandra Brigham et al.: EP41E-1848 A geostatistically grounded workflow for spatial uncertainty quantification in lidar topographic differencing Thursday, 18 December 2025, 8:30 - 12:20, Hall EFG (Poster Hall)
Colorized point cloud of mobile lidar scans in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias in California. Data Source:
Map of CONUS showing areas of NCALM lidar data collection available via OpenTopography in red.
AGU25 graphic, 'Connect with OpenTopography at AGU in New Orleans! December 15-19, 2025. Booth #908' with an outline of a meandering river.
Side-by-side view of an aerial photo of the Wisconsin coastline along Lake Michigan showing a bluff and change along the Michigan coastline showing topographic hillshades (left) and vertical change (right) from 2010- 2020.
Graphic with a colorful rainbow river relative elevation model at the bottom and text on top reading "OpenTopography. GSA Connects 2025 | Oct. 19-22"
3D point cloud of intensity of a glacier near Kachemak Bay, Alaska. Data Source: NOAA: 2024 NOAA Lidar: AK Coastal Communities (Kachemak Bay).
3D visualization of Kings Peak in Northeast Utah, USA
Graphic advertising talk "Topographic change with OpenTopography: Adventures in cloud computing, spatial uncertainty, and impactful applications" by Prof. Chelsea Scott and Dr. Cassandra Brigham
Credit: U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Graphic showcasing researchers in hardhats, with binary code and other computing elements in the background.
Hillshade of the ZigZag Landslide near Snow Basin Road (UT-226), Morgan County, Utah.
Digital Terrain Model centered on Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec.
Topographic / bathymetric dataset with the location of the M8.8 Kamchatka Peninsula EQ plotted. Red line shows coastline.
Map showing extent of data coverage, primarily over southern Canada
3D point cloud colored by RGB over a section of the Lake Michigan coastline.
3D point cloud colored by intensity of a suburban housing area filtered to return only points with a building classification (class 6).
Screen capture of the OpenTopography Raster Visualization tool with parameters for control over hillshading highlighted.
3D point cloud colored by intensity of downtown Auckland, New Zealand and the Auckland SkyTower.
Digital surface models of the mountainous topography surrounding a suburban development Phoenix, Arizona.
Colored Hillshade of Ellesmere Island
Relative elevation model of the Neches River, Texas, showing complex river channel patterns and surrounding floodplain topography in varying shades of green and blue.
Preview of newsletter set against a background of a river relative elevation model.
Graphic for the "OpenTopography Spring 2025 Webinar Series" featuring a shaded topographic map background. The series included four webinars. At the bottom, a red YouTube icon is followed by the URL: youtube.com/@OpenTopography.
Location of datasets released in February 2025 and accessible through OpenTopography. USGS 3DEP datasets are in green, OpenTopography-hosted data is in red, and Community DataSpace datasets are in purple.
Promotional graphic for a short course titled "Introduction to OpenTopography Tools for Calculating Change at the Earth’s Surface," part of the 2025 NSF GAGE/SAGE Community Science Workshop. The event is on May 18, 2025, in Bloomington, MN. The background features a topographic map pattern, and the bottom portion includes a satellite-style image with red and blue overlays representing surface changes.
Screen capture with red box highlighting an example citation.
Bar plot of Google Scholar citations.
Bar chart showing publications by year, broken down by discipline.
Multi-panel plot of a section of the Sacramento River. Top panel shows a point cloud colored by RGB values followed by hillshade plots of the ground and bathymetry data. Finally, the bathymetry was differenced from the water surface to produce a water depth map that is displayed in color draped on the DTM hillshade in the bottom panel.
Flyer summarizing webinar series of events: March 5, 2025 Introduction to OpenTopography; March 12, 2025 Introduction to point clouds; March 19, 2025 Introduction to Digital Elevation Models; March 26, 2025 Introduction to topographic differencing.
Webpage screen capture listing three advisory committees - Research, Sustainability and Technology, and Education - and their members.
comparison (gif) showing digital surface model hillshades from 2016 and 2025 over Central Altadena, CA.
Map for lidar-derived change from the Palisades Fire for La Costa Beach. Map colored red to blue to show change, overlain on a post-fire digital surface model hillshade.
3D view of a pre-wildfire lidar point cloud for a portion of Pacific Palisades showing the coastal bluffs in the center and Potrero Canyon on the right. The fire destroyed houses in this area. The 7 points/ m2 lidar dataset was acquired in 2015-2016. Data source: Los Angeles lidar 2016
OpenTopography "I heart lidar" bumper sticker.
Map of CONUS showing locations of NCALM collected lidar data as red polygons.
3D point cloud colored by elevation of the Little Beaver Creek Valley in Colorado. (Dataset: Lidar Survey of a Partially Burned Mountain Watershed, CO 2023).