Data Management Plan

These files contain rasterized topographic and bathymetric lidar elevations generated from data collected by the SHOALS-1000T bathymetric and the Leica ALS60 topographic lidar systems along the coast of Oregon and Washington. Lidar data coverage normally extends along the coastline from the waterline inland 500 meters (topography) and offshore 1,000 meters or to laser extinction. An exception to topographic coverage was made during the field data acquisition where the 500 m corridor was shifted toward the ocean to include the large occurrence of exposed rocks off the Oregon coastline. In this case the final topographic data coverage corridor was reduced to a range of 100 m to 150 m to include coverage over rocks offshore. In Washington, additional bathymetric survey areas in Puget Sound and San Juan de Fuca Strait were added on later in the field campaign to replace areas with persistent unfavorable survey conditions (weather and water clarity); topographic lidar data collection was not performed on the additional areas.

Native lidar data is not generally in a format accessible to most Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Specialized in-house and commercial software packages are used to process the native lidar data into 3-dimensional positions that can be imported into GIS software for visualization and further analysis. The 3-D position data are used to generate a series of gridded file products, with each covering approximately 5 kilometers of shoreline. The grid file index is provided by the shape file, "OR_Boxes", and the numbers used to identify files are in the "Box" field of the shape file. The data file naming convention is based on the year, project, area name, vertical datum, "Box" number and product type. An example file name is "2010_NCMP_OR_001_Grid.tif", where <2010> is the project year, <NCMP> is the project under which data were collected, <OR> is the area of data collection, <001> is the "Box" number and <Grid> is the product type (bare earth DEM or first return DSM). On bare earth DEM, interpolation has occurred over removed building footprints to fill in elevations.

In addition to these bare earth Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, the lidar point data that these DEM data were created from, are also available. These data are available for custom download at the link provided in the URL section of this metadata record.

Lineage Statement:
The USACE collected, processed, and provided the data to the NOAA Office for Coastal Management (OCM). OCM received the data and processed it to be available for custom download from the Data Access Viewer (DAV) and for bulk download from https.

Process Steps:

• These data were collected using the SHOALS-1000T and ALS60 systems. They are owned by Fugro and operated through contract. The ALS60 system collects topographic lidar data at maximum pulse rate of 200 kHz in a wavelength of 1064 nm with a CASI-1500 hyperspectral line scanner integrated with the system. The SHOALS collects bathymetric lidar data at 1kHz, RGB imagery at 1Hz and a CASI-2 hyperspectral line scanner integrated with the system as well. Aircraft position, velocity and acceleration information are collected through a Novatel and POS A/V 410 equipment (SHOALS) and the onboard GPS/IMU system (ALS60). SHOALS raw data streams are transferred to the office for downloading and processing in SHOALS GCS software. ALS60 raw data were also transferred to the office and processed in IPAS software. Aircraft position data are processed using POSPac software and the results are combined with the lidar data to produce 3-D positions for each lidar shot. Upon inspection and QA/QC in the software packages Fledermaus (SHOALS), GeoCue and TerraScan (ALS60), anomalous data are flagged as invalid. FPI Workbench and Fugro's proprietary software convert all valid data from ellipsoid to orthometric heights based on the NGS' GEOID09 model and exports data as a series of first return topography and bathymetry ASCII files. The bathymetry files contain only the returns below the water surface (no topography).
• The topographic first return and bathymetry point clouds, where both exist, are combined into a single file to create a surface model grid (DSM); bathymetric data have been limited to data below the water surface. On bare earth DEM, topographic data has been filtered to include ground returns only; These datasets are combined to create the elevation model. The raster grids are created by generating a triangulated irregular network (TIN) and then extracting the grid node elevations from the TIN surface; in the bare earth DEM, interpolation fills in elevation values over building footprints. The origin point of the grid is located at a horizontal position whose value is evenly divisible by the 1m grid resolution such that rasters from subsequent surveys have common cell boundaries. Fugro uses FPI Workbench and ArcGIS to perform this operation utilizing TIN area delineation method: "max edge length 10m"; this also secures elevations will not be interpolated more than 5m away from actual data points (except when interpolating over building footprints). The grid is converted to a TIFF raster within ArcGIS. The projection is defined as "North American Datum of 1983" using the DefineProjection command within ArcToolbox; statistics are also generated with Calculate_Statistics tool to display the grid's elevations range properly. Horizontal positions, provided in decimal degrees of latitude and longitude, are referenced to the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83). Vertical positions are referenced to the NAD83 ellipsoid and provided in meters. The National Geodetic Survey's (NGS) GEOID09 model is used to transform the vertical positions from ellipsoid to orthometric heights referenced to the North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88).
• 2022-01-10 00:00:00 - The NOAA Office for Coastal Management (OCM) received GeoTiff format files from USACE JALBTCX for the Oregon and Washington coastline project area. The bare earth raster files were at a 1 m grid spacing. The data were in geographic NAD83 coordinates and NAVD88 (Geoid09) elevations in meters. OCM assigned the appropriate EPSG codes (Horiz - 4269, Vert - 5703) and copied the raster files to https for Digital Coast storage and provisioning purposes.

Data is available online for bulk and custom downloads.