St. Paul, Minnesota, May 16, 2022 – The Great Lakes Alliance for Remote Sensing (GLARS) is pleased to announce Digital Surface Model (DSM) strips and mosaics covering 85% of the Great Lakes Basin are now available for use by researchers, conservationists, natural resource managers and the public for free. An example DSM mosaic view for northern Michigan is shown below.
Produced by GLARS partner SharedGeo[1] in collaboration with the University of Minnesota’s Polar Geospatial Center[2] (PGC), these DSM strips and mosaics for the first time provide a uniform, three-dimensional understanding of upland watershed and coastal regions of the Great Lakes at 2-meter resolution. To create these products, SharedGeo requested and received more than 70 TBs of DigitalGlobe stereo imagery through the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) NextView program. SharedGeo staff then generated the DSMs by applying fully automated, stereo auto-correlation techniques to overlapping pairs of the high-resolution optical satellite images using open-source Surface Extraction from TIN-based Search space Minimization (SETSM) software as modified by PGC and SharedGeo. This processing used over one million node hours on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) “Blue Waters” at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The resulting derived product DSM strips and mosaics create a foundation for monitoring and better understanding of a wide range of Great...