Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeqaz | Hacker News Reader

Is this data available in raw format? One of my hobbies is foraging for plants + mushrooms, and I'm often struggling to find good enough topographic data. If this dataset is available, I'd appreciate some pointers!

Also: Are there any developer-friendly datasets for climate, terrain, and other IRL data? I've spent a lot of time curating stuff from NOAA and Data.gov to fit me needs. Huge time sink! If this doesn't exist then somebody should do this ;)

View on HN

A kindred spirit! I also am a forager (from VT).

The "National Map" has a lot of the available high resolution elevation data (derived from LiDAR), but not all of it. Much of this data is collected by the states, so often there is more data on a state's geoportal. If you tell me what state you're interested in I can send you a link if I've got it.

For the national data: https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/basic/

Also have a look at the ASTER GDEM data for elevation and water body classification: https://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/gdem.asp. I have managed to successfully use this in one of my own projects, but it did take some processing to get it into a different data format for my purposes. Although this data has only about a 30-metre resolution, all the raw data does seem to be available for the vast majority of the globe (between 83 south and 83 north latitude).

ALOS seems pretty good to me (I'm a GIS noob though). They have free 30m and expensive higher res https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/en/aw3d30/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com