Tag Archives: Open Data

Mosaic Environment Agency DTM/DSM tiles using RSGISLib

Leave a reply

The Environment Agency have just made their high resolution LiDAR-derived Digital Surface Model (DSM) and Digital Terrain Model (DTM) data available under the Open Government Licence through http://environment.data.gov.uk/ds/survey

The files are downloaded as zipped archives containing ASCII format files. To create a mosaic from them I have created a script using:

  1. The archive reader functionality from TuiView, which can get a list of files within a zip archive and convert them to paths which can be read with GDAL using a virtual filesytem as described in an earlier post
  2. The ‘createImageMosaic’ function in RSGISLib to create the mosaic, changing the no data value from -9999 to 0
  3. The ‘assignProj’ function in RSGISLib to assign the correct projection to the mosaic
  4. The ‘popImageStats’ function in RSGISLib to calculate stats and overviews for fast display in TuiView and other programs

The script mosaic_ea_lidar.py is available to download and is run using:

python mosaic_ea_lidar.py -o sx36_dsm_mosaic.kea \
           ~/Downloads/LIDAR-DSM-1M-SX36.zip

Multiple zip files can be passed in at once to be added to the same mosaic. The output format is set based on the output file extension.

A similar script using using GRASS through the ARSF DEM Scripts is also available to download from here. Usage is the same.