The USGS is making this change because LAZ is an open source, directly accessible, ready-to-use format that also provides significant compression. By switching to LAZ, USGS will reduce costs associated with production, storage, and distribution. Because it allows processing directly in the cloud, the LAZ format also supports the USGS future direction to provide access to 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) lidar data in the Amazon S3 Cloud. Further, LAZ files can be loaded directly into many commonly used GIS software packages without the need to decompress the files. The binary files and source code for LAZ are open source and freely available to the public.
Currently, the NGP serves all lidar point clouds in the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing “LASer” (LAS) format... After the transition is complete, all duplicate LAS data will be removed from distribution ...continued ...