The AGIO is responding to a request from the GIS Board to coordinate lidar data development in an effort to reduce duplication of effort. Shelby Johnson provided  an update on AGIO efforts related to lidar availability within the state at the AR GIS User Forum meeting today. The AGIO has been coordinating with US Army COE, FEMA, NRCS and USGS to determine where publically funded lidar exist within the state of Arkansas.

The AGIO is tackling this topic from two angles. The first is coordinating to compile a geographic footprint that details the availability of lidar data and the points of contact. Note: Availability means complete, contracted or planned for the purpose of this effort. You can download the file from GeoStor here http://goo.gl/PIgJb. The AGIO needs your help. Please let us know if you are aware of lidar projects that have been completed, are contracted, or planned. We will continue to update this file as projects come to our attention.

The second is related to the dissemination of the lidar data. We are visiting with a number of folks to determine the best way to provide the data. This data provides some unique challenges; primarily size. There is also the challenge of ensuring the data is provided in a manner that the end user would like to receive it which could be as a raster, contours, TIN, and various levels of processing. Given the size of the data, users likely would not want to retrieve an area much more than 10 sq/mi which is equivalent to roughly 1GB of data (depending on the format requested). There is also a GeoStor processing limit of 1GB on rasters. This will be a long term discussion and we encourage your feedback. In the meantime we will be collecting the lidar data as provided from originators and will support the dissemination via hard-drives in the raw formats specified by the individual contracts.

So let the fun begin with new challenges associated with lidar.