The UK Environment Agency (EA) will make its LiDAR data sets freely available to all users from September 2015.
Until now the EA’s accurate elevation data covering approximately 60 per cent of England and Wales was only accessible to selected non-commercial entities. The LiDAR technique that is used for environmental and land-use modelling, flood monitoring, asset management and urban planning will be available from September this year to the general public. This will also enable app developers to apply this dataset for their own tools.
"Following the floods of 2014, the Environment Agency made a decision to look at all the data sets and work out the feasibility of making them open. So they set up a data advisory group, which consists of members of the Environment Agency and lots of other interested parties from government and other organisations and they have been looking at the issue of open data for the last year," explained Susan Winter, Marketing officer of UK Environment Agency.
