FROM CRASHING KITES AND FRANKENMODELS TO EFFICIENT LARGE-SCALE UAV ACQUISITIONS AND BEAUTIFUL SHARED 3D MODELS (Invited Presentation)

Many geoscience questions require topographic and imagery data acquired at the fine spatial scales and temporal frequencies at which processes of interest operate. A birds-eye view provides that synoptic perspective critical to geoscience analysis. Data have been acquired using kites and balloons as aerial platforms. Advances in and decreasing costs for software (algorithms such as structure from motion), computational hardware (rapid computation of colored point clouds and textured 3D models), and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as semi-autonomous sensing platforms has absolutely changed the geoscientist’s toolkit. I will review some of the faulting, volcanological, and surface process-related geoscience questions advanced with these tools and then present several examples. Our recent UAV campaign on the Volcanic Tableland near Bishop California collected nearly 14,000 images to produce dm-scale digital elevation models and orthoimages. Despite some georeferencing challenges, these data sharpen our analysis of deformation in the imaged fault arrays and on fault scarp development in these fractured materials. A single day of good flight conditions and efficient acquisitions enabled us to collect images and produce a detailed model of the Tecolote Volcano in the Pinacate Volcanic Field in Sonora Mexico. These data provide the basis for understanding the eruptive history of the volcano and have been published on OpenTopography (OT). Rapid acquisition of imagery of deformed fossiliferous and tuff-bearing sedimentary rocks in the Afar region of Ethiopia provide 3D control for paleontological provenance and environmental reconstruction studies. The growing interest in and production of these data and needs for publishing, sharing, discovery, and processing are addressed in part by enhancements to the OT Community DataSpace, which provides hosting and preservation for these “long-tail” (acquired by individual investigators or small teams and of modest size but great value with no established means of sharing or archiving) topographic data. Additional needs for the community include optimized data acquisition strategies, low cost and high performance computation of point clouds and models, efficient and accurate georeferencing, and high quality differencing for change detection.