All UK environment agency lidar data now available

[Redrobes]

I have been playing about with this for a few weeks now and its pretty cool. For a while I have been petitioning people to give me some lidar data to test out my apps and do some processing on it. Some of the people involved have links to the environment agency and I was told that it was in beta that you could download the whole UK wide selection of data. It seems that this news is now out there so I thought I might as well post it here too.

https://environmentagency.blog.gov.u...-up-open-data/


EDIT - That links seems to be dead but my bookmarked link is still active:
http://environment.data.gov.uk/ds/su...ex.jsp#/survey


Its very cool. Personally I would strongly recommend that if you do want some of this data then a) go for the DSM's not the DTM's since the DTMs is *just* the ground level and has no buildings or trees in it. Its the real terrain level only. The DSMs is more raw but does contain houses, trees and pretty much all the useful stuff too. Also, b) go get the lowest res you can get first and check out the data. In most cases all the area covered does not contain lidar info and the data is in swathes of it - I presume its flight paths. It seems to me that they cover the rivers and notable features instead of going for a full block scan.

If the low res data contains the part you want then go for the higher res ones.

I got some of some hills around me which contained an iron age hill fort:


I rewrote some software I was using to be able to virtually emulate what it might look like cut with a NC mill and then cut it:


So I can cut this lidar data now too. Its a pretty expensive operation to do large but it can be done.

As for dealing with this data yourself, well its in standard ArcASCII format so I think many things will read it. Not least I would have expected the free GIS apps and maybe Wilbur amongst others.

I reckon it could be real useful to use for some kinds of real world mapping but it might be a bit overkill to use for fantasy mapping. Some of the data has usage restrictions to it. I think it might be non commercial and need attribution so check with the license pages for it.

But I have had some fun just looking at some locally known places with this.