Lidar update: As some of you know, Edward Earl and Andrew Kirmse put together a program that calculated prominences for peaks around the entire world using SRTM data (which google earth uses) and digitally derived data from USGS maps for the US.
See here for more info. It's pretty cool.
Joe Grim has worked with Andrew to learn the ins and outs of the program, and to make it compatible with lidar-derived DEMs. Over the past several weeks, Joe's downloaded, renamed, and tweaked countless DEM tiles from The National Map. He did an initial run-through a few days ago of the available coverage for Colorado (UTM zone 13), southern Wyoming, and northern New Mexico. See analysis coverage maps from Joe below.
Coverage.jpg
Coverage2.png
The results he's come up with are very helpful! It'll help us find more demoted peaks, QC already analyzed peaks, and continue the search for more ranked peaks.
From these results, John and I found two newly ranked peaks in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison! He believes Island Peaks is incorrectly labeled on the
map, and they are actually SE of the former location.
The map saddles are extremely erroneous - the first one thought to have 171' of interpolated prominence (actually 322'), and the second thought to have 160' (actually 398').
https://listsofjohn.com/peak/218499
https://listsofjohn.com/peak/218500
Tom Pierce, these might possibly be new class 5 peaks to add to your list!
Joe's planning on finishing up Colorado and probably doing Wyoming. So far he's used 2TB of data, filling up a lot of space on his computer. If anyone wanted other states done and sent a gift for some large external hard drives, he might find that tempting. Right now we aren't putting these results directly into LoJ as they aren't quite as accurate as manual analysis and there are incorrect results here and there due to sharp saddles, artificial saddles, sharp summit features being excluded from the DEMs, and lower summit values due to averaged 1 meter DEM tiles vs single point cloud returns. They are good for guidance and QC though and will aid our manual analysis.
Thanks for all your work, Joe!
Unrelated side note - Scott, unfortunately Joe and I found
Turkey Monster to be unranked. Still a cool looking pinnacle though.
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