Connecting to the San Juan data as a web service.

From ArcMap (tested in version 10 and 9.3.1), you can connect to this data as a WCS service. This is similar to an SDE read-only connection. From the catalog window of ArcMap, or from the AddData button follow the steps below.
  1. Select GIS Servers and doubleclick on Add WCS Server
  2. For the URL, enter https://delta.ess.washington.edu/ArcGIS/services/San_Juan_LiDAR/GeoDataServer/WCSServer and click OK
  3. Bring back the catalog window and you will see "San_Juan_LiDAR on delta.ess.washington.edu".
  4. Click on the plus sign and you will see the data layers.
  5. Drag a dataset onto your map to use it.
It will behave just as if you had downloaded the entire filegeodatabase, except that metadata is sparse. You will have to refer to the PSLC for metadata. Drag any layer onto your map to view it. You will be able to view the data with little loss of performance compared to local data. If you wish to save locally, you can right right-click on any data layer and click on "Data >  Export Data...". You can download the entire raster, clip to a drawn rectangle, or clip to the data view. If you clip to the data view, snapping is not supported, so your result can shift as much as half a cell. Snapping is ensured by cliping to a drawn rectangle or by using a polygon feature layer and the "Extract by Rectangle" tool under the Spatial Analyst Tools.  To clip the data using a drawn rectangle follow the steps below.

   Clipping to a drawn rectangle:
  1. In ArcMap, start in Data view (rather than Layout view).
  2. Invoke the drawing toolbar and draw your clipping rectangle.
  3. Edit the rectangle's object properties to make it snap. Change the corner coordinate and the Width and Height of the rectangle to multiples of three.
  4. Right-click on the raster dataset in the Table of Contents and choose "Data>Export Data...".  In the Export WCS Data window, choose the "Selected Graphics" button.
  5. After you have chosen where to save the new dataset, click on the save button.

This server is under development. Service may be sporadic, and passwords may be instituted when we figure out how to do it. We will have to curtail access if demand exceeds capacity.

Note: Unlike most LiDAR DEMs, and unlike the supermosaic, this is three-foot dataset.