The United Kingdom’s Environment Agency has begun publishing all 11 terabytes of its Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data, which maps England’s landscape in three dimensions, for the public to use freely. LIDAR data is useful for a wide variety of applications ranging from flood modelling to creating realistic virtual environments in video games. For the past six years, the Environment Agency has published composite LIDAR data for most of the country due to the technical challenges of publishing such large amounts of data, but it has now decided to publish all of the LIDAR data the agency has collected for the past 17 years.
Image: Kenming Wang.