I came across a great resource recently and have directed the MSc GIS/RS students to it for their next assignment. OpenTopography is a huge repository of freely available topographic data (raster and vector) but of particular interest to the GIS/RS students is the point cloud data that they are using for their LiDAR assignment.
I counted 271 aerial LiDAR datasets, 8 terrestrial laser scanner datasets and 4 photogrammetrically-derived point clouds. I was impressed not only by the volume but also the variety, with point clouds of everything ranging from volcanoes to landslides to urban centres. It is a simple drag and drop selection and download interface and you don't even need to register for the smaller files. It will also provide partial processing for you in the download options! Data is largely concentrated in USA but I spotted data for New Zealand, Spain and other locations.
My only complaint so far is that when you are selecting data for one of the change detection studies (very helpfully flagged as such in the listing) you do not know where in the test site the change occurred - but the dataset is too large to download it all and find out, so you are kind of snookered! Note: I googled for a nice image to show snookered but there was none, what's up with that?
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