Easy To Browse Lidar Imagery Now On National Map (good For Prospecting And Relic Hunting)

[jasong]

It may have been up for a while and old news, but new to me, I just browsed through some stuff and noticed that what they are calling "3DEP" is in fact LIDAR imagery.

It's not available everywhere yet, but it's easy to view it in the places it is now - before this you had to import imagery into GIS or other similar programs and now you can just browse it like you would Google Earth. Some places have extremely high resolution LIDAR while others are lower resolution and not as useful. Arizona unfortunately is one of the places lacking in sufficient coverage.

https://apps.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

Go there, open the layers list (3rd icon from the left), and select a 3DEP layer. I find the "Elevation Tinted Hillshade" to be easiest to see details on. Here is an example - as you can see - there are foundations plainly visible and things like stream channels are also visible through vegetation, old roads, etc. LIDAR is more useful than aerials in cases like these and probably are useful for relic/coin detectorists as well.

[Cascade Steven]

Jasong:  Thanks for sharing.  This is a great tool for any detectorist. 

[jasong]

Found this map of availability and progress. Looks like most of the Sierras (crosshatched) are planned to be completed by the end of the fiscal year so those in CA should have some interesting imagery to work with by next year I'm guessing. Lots of the Mohave Desert is for some reason just not a priority to acquire imagery on though yet unfortunately.

White is no imagery and no plans to acquire it yet.

Most areas on the East Coast seem to available though, or almost complete.

[IronDigger]

Thanks Jason, I have now spent 3 hours looking over my areas of interest because of your great link. What a great resource, thanks. 

[F350Platinum]

Thank you so much for posting this, been looking for this stuff for a long time! 👍

[kac]

Wonder if that is new, last time I was there they didn't have those listed and needed a 3rd party lidar viewer.

[jasong]

16 minutes ago, kac said:

Wonder if that is new, last time I was there they didn't have those listed and needed a 3rd party lidar viewer.

Not sure, I hadn't noticed them before so I decided to click on them out of curiosity, got lucky that a place I was looking was one with really high resolution imagery, and I was like..."wait a second, this is actually LIDAR, awesome!". In some places it appears to be 1m resolution (or less?), and you can see stuff aerial imagery don't show. In other places the resolution isn't enough to be really useful yet though.

Also noticed when I was browsing Google Maps or something (I can't remember exactly which app) that the base layer before they render the maps on top, when terrain is enabled, is also LIDAR. It was a few months ago, I noticed by accident on a slow 3g connection that wasn't rendering the top layer very fast. Whatever the app was, I couldn't force it to just display the LIDAR layer though so I never posted it. You know maybe it was like Zillow or something like that...can't remember.

So anyways, seems like the data sets are getting distributed better now. It was a serious pain in the butt to track each individual snapshot down and stitch them, etc until recently.

[oldmancoyote1]

 

There is coverage for the south eastern part of the Klamath Mountains, specifically coverage for the Carr-Hirsh-Delta... Fire areas.The lidar images from this web site are fantastic.  Here is a satellite image for one area and the lidar image for the same area.  The second image shows pocket gold pits that are otherwise invisible.  The images are about 600 feet across.  The scale info on these copies is not correct.

 

 

[jasong]

Most excellent.

 

 

[rvpopeye]

Bookmatked ! Nice find ! THX for posting !👍