DwnWthVwls

I didn't know where to put this, but I figured Plankton and a few others might have some interest in it. It's easier to explain with pictures than saying Foresty/Geospatial Analysis..

Soooooooooooo... This is Quick Terrain Modeler(QTM):

This is a point cloud. It was created by an airplane flying over a portion of Atlantic City, NJ and using LiDAR technology to scan the terrain. Each individual dot/point you see represents a point where the laser scan bounced off the terrain and returned to the LiDAR unit as a recording.



After uploading the point cloud into QTM, I opened it as a gridded modeled which creates a smooth terrain based on all the points collected. Here is the very same area after the process is complete:



Next, I overlayed some texture files to make it look better, and I added a file which overlays the evacuation route for floods (see red line). The blue you see is the water level from playing with the "Flood Analysis" tool. In this picture I set the water level to 3ft of flooding. If you can't tell this is an image of a residential area.



Here is what the area would look like under 10 ft of water...




This was the first project I completed for my LiDAR class. We had to do a flood analysis of the Atlantic City area, and make pretend recommendations to the officials determining when it was safe for people to evacuate versus when it was too late and they had to get to higher ground. When I get out in the real world, I hope to use this technology, along side another program called ArcMap, to solve problems and study the forests. It's a nice mix of getting out into the wilderness to physically do the laser scanning and sitting behind a desk doing computer work.

I don't really want this thread to be about me, so if anyone else has interesting things they've done in college or as a career, that'd be cool.

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...