Leveraging Tile Indexes for Programmatic Access to OpenTopography’s Lidar Datasets

This notebook explores two distinct strategies for working with tiled point cloud datasets. First, it demonstrates how to leverage an OpenTopography-provided tile index to programmatically identify and download only the specific files covering a defined area of interest. Second, it will introduce a more advanced, cloud-native workflow that uses PDAL to stream data directly from remote storage, allowing users to clip and process the data on-the-fly without requiring local downloads of the lidar tiles.