I apologize for not knowing all the proper terminology to ask this question. I am seeking a commercial service for providing pay-per-use high resolution elevation data in North America. It must come with defined ToS (terms of service -- a guarantee of availability). A paid service is best.
The ideal service would return a chunk of elevation data, perhaps in ARC/INFO ASCII GRID format, on demand. Ideally this grid would be seamlessly centered on a given coordinate. For this application I need a regular grid of elevation points perhaps 2000 or 3000 grid elements in the x and y direction (if the data returned were richer LIDAR data, I would need to interpolate into a grid using las2dem or some such).
I am aware of scattered sources of free LIDAR elevation data:
- http://lidar.cr.usgs.gov/
- http://www.opentopography.org/
- http://calm.geo.berkeley.edu/ncalm/ddc.html
I'm seeking something that is (a) offering wider coverage with less hassle (b) a web service returning data in close to real time (c) supplying seamless data centered on a point on earth, rather than tiles (d) commercially usable and supported with terms of service (e) command line scriptable (e.g. using wget or other scriptable tools outside of a GIS). For example:
wget http://ppv.example.org?lat=37.1234&lon=-122.1234
&rows=1024&columns=1024&format=ascii_esri_grid&data_type=dsm:best_available
Is this a crazy desire, or is there something that fits the bill?
Possible question keywords: WFS, web service,hosted LIDAR data server