Exploring How Amazon Web Services Power USGS 3DEP Lidar Archive with Howard Butler

This episode of the Points + Pixels podcast focuses on the use
open source software solutions to support the new U.S. Geological
Survey’s 3DEP data portal on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Howard
Butler of Hobu, Inc. discusses how this innovative project was
conceived and how it’s design is based on the Landsat program, a
federal government imagery acquisition initiative that has
documented Earth’s “land features and coastal regions” since
1972.


This new Lidar data sharing capability allows users to browse a
national map service for point cloud data, which can either be
downloaded locally or processed in the AWS cloud environment.
Hobu utilized Entwine Point Tiles (EPT), which is an open,
static, implicit, and lossless octree-like tile service for point
cloud data, that leverages the popular LASzip data encoding
specification.