I downloaded data from Noaa that is in .LAZ format. I need to convert it to .LAS format. I have the lastools toolbox and have looked through the tools and not had much luck yet. Does anyone have any ideas on how to get these files converted? Thanks
In the download there are arcgis toolboxes and in the LAStools.tbx there is a arcscript laszip that wil also unzip to las
gr Peter
would be wise for ESRI to consider enabling direct import of LAZ dataset into a LAS dataset. Data size is much more manageable. Extra conversion with zLAS seems like a re-invented wheel that doesnt work as well as LAZ
Data Interoperability extension can convert LAZ to LAS Dataset.
Regards
There is an Idea asking Esri to add a LAZ driver, please go vote it up:
Some days it's hard not to be cynical. The geonet forums have posts going back to at least 2013, but somehow the "Support LAZ format" idea has been pulled.
Has anyone tried PDAL yet? (See pdal.io webside) It seems like it might be a reasonable compromise.
I want to keep lidar source data in the format in which I download it (LAZ) and I want to produce products from it (typically contours, hillshades). These days I seem to do 90% of my GIS work in Python scripts so a workflow that can do that would be ideal for me-- I would preprocess in a PDAL tool chain to produce an intermediate product (a DEM) and then do the remaining processing in ArcGIS.
The rapidlasso guy is always going on about the evils of closed source but he's producing closed source... the option he gives me is the ability to move from LAZ to LAS, requiring massive disk space then to manage LAS.
I'd be fine with using a tool chain that's all ESRI as long as it does not require converting terabytes of data from LAZ to LAS to zLAS as the first step. I already voted for the LAZ support idea.