Coastal LiDAR

Santa Clara county

For this project I want to closely examine a reach of road that goes into the hills to see if it can accommodate addition of a footpath.

I downloaded data that was collected by the Santa Clara Water District in 2006. The area of interest is small, covered by 4 tiles. See https://coast.noaa.gov/htdata/lidar1_z/geoid12a/data/4870/ The data is in LAZ format.

What coordinate system is this data in? It's in WGS84 and the vertical unit is 1 meter.

First thing I want to do is generate simple first return and last return surfaces.

The files are already classified, see the metadata:

"This data set is an LAZ (compressed LAS) format file containing LIDAR point cloud data. LAS format files, raw LiDAR data in its native format, classified bare-earth LiDAR DEM and photogrammetrically derived breaklines generated from LiDAR Intensity stereo-pairs. Breakline, Top of Bank, and contour files in ESRI personal geodatabase format, Microstation V8 .dgn format, and AutoCAD 2004 formats for the San Jose Phase 3 project of Santa Clara County, Ca. This project arrived with only unclassified data. NOAAs Office for Coastal Management performed an automated classification using lasground. Although class 1 and class 2 are available, there was no QA/QC on the points after lasground was performed."

Generating surfaces from raw data For ArcGIS this means "terrains". For QGIS it means DEM rasters. I am starting with terrains, which means first I need to get the data out of the LAZ files and into ArcGIS.

http://www.spatialguru.com/lidar-data-to-raster-file-with-open-source-gdal-tool/

http://www.laszip.org/

Gold Beach

20-Apr-2011 Going to Gold Beach for Easter weekend, so naturally I am looking at Curry county data once again.

I have a nice NAIP 2009 photo of the area now. 1/2 meter 2009 county level files are available as zipped files via FTP from Oregon Explorer

Working with LiDAR obtained from the Oregon Coastal Atlas

Holes in LiDAR data

I have created a contour and a hillshade, which is great, but the LiDAR is full of holes! I think since it's a coastal dataset (NOAA) they don't care about the areas up a bit from the beach.

I am thinking I can fill the holes with 10m DEM data, so I found an example on how to do this and will look at it this evening.

http://blogs.esri.com/Support/blogs/mappingcenter/archive/2009/06/16/Filling-and-clipping-a-raster.aspx