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Comment by jtr1 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, these are gorgeous! Can I ask where you get your DEM data and at what resolution? I’ve been wanting to play around with some relief maps of various bioregions (eg the Great Lakes watershed, Cascadia, etc), but I’ve had trouble figuring out where to find data at the right resolution

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Where do we get it? Only publicly available sources. Usgs has a great portal. Private data is too expensive to get. I was quoted 6 figures for a larger area. They were going to fly a plane and capture it :)

What resolution? Totally depends on the area the customer would like to cover. If it’s their ranch or property, we usually need 1-meter. If it’s a mountain range than 30-Meter works.

It mainly depends on the resolution limit for 3D printing. So it also depends on the size of the model they want.

Unfortunately not all areas are covered with high res

Did they quote by line-kilometre flown, any chance of sharing the number?

Full multi channel or just LIDAR?

It was one of these two vendors, I forget which:

https://apollomapping.com/digital-elevation-models https://www.l3harrisgeospatial.com/Data-Imagery/Elevation-Da...

I don't wanna share the number but it was 6 figures

USGS provides all their data for free

https://www.usgs.gov/the-national-map-data-delivery/gis-data...

They have full US coverage and many infill sets at higher resolutions.

They have 1 metre DEMs ( ~ one elevation per three foot x three foot square )

https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/items?q=&filter=tags=Dig...

and more if you get to know their community and products (they are a firehose of likely more data than many can afford to reliably store).

There a number of publicly available sources, but I have used https://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/

(Near) global coverage, 90m resolution. Easy to fetch tiles with a script.

For the benefit of those who aren't familiar: SRTM was the space shuttle radar tomography mission. 30m resolution is now available (I remember 30m being released for the first time in the 2000s sometime I think).

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