Creating Digital Surface Models GeoTIFF Using National Map Downloader, LiDAR Point Clouds and PDAL

Find LiDAR Point Clouds on the National Map Downloader: https://apps.nationalmap.gov/downloader/#/

Select Find Elevation Source Data (3DEP) – Lidar, IfSAR

Search for LiDAR Point Cloud (LPC)

Click Export all results as a TXT file and save to a directory.

Then run this Unix command on the text file to download point clouds:

Next create a pipeline.txt for pdal with the classification (For DSM, 1 are unclassified points like buildings and treetops, while 2 are ground points, if you want a DEM, you can also make them this way too with Classification of 2:2):

Next convert the point clouds into digital surface model (GeoTIFF), you can use this shell command with xargs to go over each LAS file, using the above pipeline:

The above command can be somewhat slow depending on how many LAZ point clouds you need to go through and your selected resolution. -P3 sets the number of parallel process (3) which can help speed things up a bit.

Now we have the digital surface models raster that can be used in QGIS for hillshade for 3D.

Build a virtual raster (dsm.vrt) for easy loading into QGIS rather than loading separate files.