OPW releases Lidar captured as part of Flood Risk Management Projects as Open data
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From: Office of Public Works
- Published on: 2 July 2021
- Last updated on: 11 April 2025
The Office of Public Works has released lidar captured as part of Flood Risk Management Projects as Open data under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license through the Geological Survey of Ireland’s Open Topographic Data Viewer, click here
The data covers many urban and coastal areas across Ireland and is freely useable, with attribution, for all commercial and non-commercial projects. The data covers the main urban areas in the country and much of the coastline in the East and South East.
Lidar data is collected using a laser sensor on aircraft or satellites. It generates a dense cloud of points from which a digital elevation model (DEM) or digital map showing ground elevations on a regular grid is created. The data released has a cell size of 2 or 5 meters, so the points are 2m (or 5m) apart on a regular grid. This data is used in a wide range of software, including many freely available ones, for example GDAL (www.gdal.org) and QGIS (www.qsis.org)
Patrick O’Donovan, T.D., Minister of State with responsibility for the Office of Public Works (OPW), said:
"I am delighted that OPW is making this data freely available with attribution for all commercial and non-commercial projects which is in support of the Governments Open Data Strategy. This is a high value dataset and by making it openly available it provides new opportunities for research and innovation to take place in the areas that the data covers, while also helping improve on existing products and techniques.”
This data was initially prepared for the Irish Coastal Protection Strategy Study (ICPSS) and the Catchment Flood Risk Assessment and Management (CRFAM) programme carried out by the OPW and, for the ICPSS, the Department of the Marine, DCENR and the Department of Agriculture Food and the Marine. Further work to bring the data into a single dataset was carried out as part of the Flood Estimation Methodology for Ireland (FEMI) programme by the OPW.
The Open Topographic Data Viewer was developed by the Geological Survey of Ireland in 2018 and hosts a large amount of data from the GSI, Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), National parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and other bodies.
See map below showing the extent of the OPW data now available.
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