LIDAR Point Cloud Sources

Best sources for free LIDAR point clouds (probably LAS or LAZ format):

US Interagency Elevation Inventory: https://coast.noaa.gov/inventory/

For MICRODEM, the data must be in UTM or geographic coordinates. There are options to reproject with MICRODEM, liblas, or LAStools. LAS lidar

General caveats:

May need to get LAStools to
- reproject data if it is not UTM
- uncompress LAZ data if that is what you get
MICRODEM will identify each project area by the name of the directory. You should put the files for each project in a separate directory, and give it a short, meaningful name

Source and directions	Web site	Notes
OpenTopography	http://www.opentopography.org/	Mostly US, but now a lot of data from New Zealand. If you have an edu email, you can get USGS lidar.
NOAA Coastal Lidar	Graphical: http://coast.noaa.gov/dataviewer/?# Projects list: http://coast.noaa.gov/dataviewer/?dataregistry/#/coastallidar Getting lots of data	Some surveys may penetrate water; others only coastal strips of land. For many areas multiple dates are available, showing temporal change.
National Map directions USGS TNM Download	https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/basic/
USGS Coastal	http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/lsrm/data/products_year.html
Status of state mapping	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lidar_Dataset_(United_States)	Countries with good national lidar: Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, UK, Wales

Problems with ftp data download? Your network might view these downloads as a security risk.

Other sites

http://liblas.org/samples/ includes a sample with waveforms
http://www.laszip.org/index.html#download-laz-data links to many sites
http://www.lidar-online.com/ has some free data in LAZ format.
http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/hurricanes/data/lidar.php
Puget Sound LIDAR Consortium. State Plane Coordinate System, in feet. Very nice urban data set of downtown Seattle. They might not so active any more.
Check US state sites: NC, LA, OH, PA

LVIS: http://lvis.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.php

Commercial LIDAR clearing house:

http://lidardata.com/ (US only; they have a KMZ file which slows points representing survey areas; you can download a shape file for each showing the actual coverage areas).

Last revised 11/30/2022