POSE

CUDEM+IVERT

🤗 Welcome to our CUDEM/IVERT POSE Project

An Open-Source Framework for Rapid Development and Validation of High-Accuracy Digital Elevation Models

Highlights

• Funded by the National Science Foundation, this project aims to scope and plan a sustainable Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE) around the CUDEM and IVERT software packages.
• The project focuses on drafting a long-term governance framework, expanding documentation, and establishing best practices to support a growing community of users and contributors.
• The team is actively hosting community workshops, virtual meetings, and student training sessions to gather feedback and democratize access to high-accuracy coastal elevation modeling tools.
• By hardening these tools for wider public use, the project directly supports disaster prevention, infrastructure planning, and climate resilience efforts across public and private sectors.
• Our software includes CUDEM, a suite of tools for fetching public data, processing point clouds and rasters, gridding via various interpolation algorithms, and transforming datums.
• Our companion software IVERT porvides a command-line tool that rapidly validates raster DEMs against NASA’s ICESat-2 photon data by masking and filtering unreliable areas (e.g., water, buildings), performing automatic datum transformations, and generating detailed statistical reports and error maps.

Links

• CUDEM - FOSS DEM generation suite.
• IVERT - Validation of DEMs using IceSat2.
• NSF POSE - NSF POSE Award Overview.
• Zulip Channel - Join our Zulip Channel to connect and engage with us.

Get Started

Interested in getting started building your first high-resolution DEM? Here is an example for New Orleans:

First, install the CUDEM software.

Next, create a text file named CRM.datalist in your working directory. This file acts as a configuration list that tells CUDEM which data to fetch and how to prioritize it. Open the file in any text editor and paste the following content, which instructs the software to combine various low-resolution bathymetry and high-resolution topography sources:

## CRM Datalist
## Format is path/fetch-module format-id:format-opts weight uncertainty

# Bathymetry
mar_grav -106:bathy_only=True:pnt_fltrs="rq:threshold=2:raster=gmrt" .001
charts -200:pnt_fltrs="rq:theshold=2:raster=gmrt" .1
charts -200:want_contours=True .1
hydronos:datatype=xyz -202:pnt_fltrs="rq:threshold=25:raster=gmrt" .1
multibeam -201:pnt_fltrs="rq:threshold=50:raster=gmrt;outlierz:multipass=4" 1
ehydro -203 1
hydronos:datatype=bag -202:explode=True 2

# Topography
ned -215:mask_coast=True:remove_flat=True .25
ned1 -215:mask_coast=True 2

(you can run fetches --modules to see all supported CUDEM dataset modules, this is just a few!).

Next, run this waffles command (running waffles —help will give a brief explainer of what all these command-line options do) and it’ll automatically download the datasets needed from the CRM.datalist file that was just created of the New Orleans area, and from that data will generate a brand-new DEM at 1/9-arc-second (~3 m) resolution.

waffles -Rloc:"new orleans" -E.1s -Pepsg:4269+5703 -Amixed -Onola -Mcudem -w CRM.datalist

This will output a DEM file named ‘nola.tif’. All the downloaded data will be retained in their respective directories and will be re-used in subsequent iterations of DEM generation.

If you want to visualize that DEM, use CUDEM’s perspecto hillshade module to create a color-coded hillshade (as with our other cli tools perspecto --help will give a brief description of its options):

perspecto nola.tif

If you’d like to learn more, check out more in-depth CUDEM Github tutorials 1 2 and the various modules available.

Feel free to ask questions in our Zulip chat space! And/or, fill out this Google form so the DEM team can get in touch with you.