Mount Rainier National Park Bare Earth LiDAR DEM

Bare earth LiDAR tiles have been mosaicked into large file geodatabases for convenient use. This format can now be accessed through ESRI software. Other vendors may have interfaces in their software for this format.

This image was created by coloring the DEM with the rainbow shadeset (also known as the psylocybin shadeset) and setting transparency to 50%, with the shaded-relief shadeset underneath. The background image is derived from the USGS 10-meter DEM. The DEM is a one-meter lattice. You will not see how good it really is until you download it and zoom in.

See the vendor's report

We have mosaicked only the bare-earth DEM and shaded relief. We now have the point data as 1290 laz files. The National Park Service has a zipped "grid" workspace, additional glacial data and metadata.

Download rainierlidar.gdb database directory zipped to 4123236205-bytes (~4 gigabytes)

Select the .gdb directory in ArcMap:AddData or in ArcCatalog. It should contain two grids. The shaded-relief image was built with the default elevation and azimuth of 45 and 135. Pyramids were created with bilinear resampling.

Watch out for crevasses!

You can download this png file or the georeferenced tiff version.

Warning: We recently discovered that there are jumps on some tile boundaries. The DEM posted by the park service is also made from mismatched tiles, though they seem to have been mosaicked in a different order. A close examination shows that these jumps are differences in snow/ice depth bewtween flights Sept 2007, Sept 2008 and Oct 2008.

Wait it has grown worse! The ice has continued to melt, and the old peak at Columbis Crest of 14411 feet has dropped (so far) 21 feet. And Liberty Cap has dropped 26.3 feet. The current peak seems to be a rocky part of the crater rim at 14399.6 feet.