2022 IN DNR Lidar DEM: Indiana Coastline

Create custom data files by choosing data area, map projection, file format, etc. A new metadata will be produced to reflect your request using this record as a base.

Bulk download of data files in the original coordinate system.

The Data Access Viewer (DAV) allows a user to search for and download elevation, imagery, and land cover data for the coastal U.S. and its territories. The data, hosted by the NOAA Office for Coastal Management, can be customized and requested for free download through a checkout interface. An email provides a link to the customized data, while the original data set is available through a link within the viewer.

This graphic displays the footprint for this lidar data set.

Link to custom download, from the Data Access Viewer (DAV), the lidar point data from which these raster Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data were created.

Link to the hydro breaklines in ESRI gdb and OGC GeoPackage formats.

Link to view the point cloud (using the Entwine Point Tile (EPT) format) in the 3D Potree viewer.

Entwine Point Tile (EPT) is a simple and flexible octree-based storage format for point cloud data. The data is organized in such a way that the data can be reasonably streamed over the internet, pulling only the points you need. EPT files can be queried to return a subset of the points that give you a representation of the area. As you zoom further in, you are requesting higher and higher densities. A dataset in EPT will contain a lot of files, however, the ept.json file describes all the rest. The EPT file can be used in Potree and QGIS to view the point cloud.

The boresight was completed prior to project execution. The following steps describe the Raw Data Processing process:

1) Technicians processed the raw data to LAS format flight lines using the final GNSS/IMU solution. This LAS data set was used as source data for lidar matching.

2) Technicians utilized commercial and proprietary software packages to analyze how well flight line overlaps match for the entire lift and adjusted as necessary until the results met the project specifications.

3) Once all lifts were completed with lidar matching, the technicians checked and corrected the vertical misalignment of all flight lines and also the matching between data and ground truth. The relative accuracy was less than or equal to 6 cm RMSEz within individual swaths and less than or equal to 8 cm RMSEz or within swath overlap (between adjacent swaths).

4) The technicians ran a final vertical accuracy check of the flight lines against the surveyed check points after the z correction to ensure the requirement of NVA = 19.6 cm 95% Confidence Level (Required Accuracy) was met. Point classification was performed according to USGS Lidar Base Specification 2021, Revision A, and breaklines were collected for water features. Bare-earth DEMs were exported from the classified point cloud using collected breaklines for hydroflattening.

LAS Point Classification: The point classification is performed as described below. The bare-earth surface is then manually reviewed to ensure correct classification on the Class 2 (Ground) points. After the bare-earth surface is finalized, it is then used to generate all hydro-breaklines through heads-up digitization. All Class 2 (Ground) lidar data inside of the Lake Pond and Double Line Drain hydro-flattened breaklines were then classified to Class 9 (Water) using LP360 functionality.

A buffer of 1 ft was also used around each hydro-flattened feature to classify these Class 2 (Ground) points to Class 20 (Ignored Ground). All Lake Pond Island and Double Line Drain Island features were checked to ensure that the Class 2 (Ground) points were reclassified to the correct classification after the automated classification was completed. All data was manually reviewed and any remaining artifacts removed using functionality provided by LP360, TerraScan and TerraModeler.

Global Mapper was used as a final check of the bare-earth dataset. GeoCue was then used to create the deliverable industry-standard LAS files. Sanborn Map Company, Inc. proprietary software was used to perform final statistical analysis of the classes in the LAS files, on a per tile level to verify final classification metrics and full LAS header information.

Data was tested at 0.29 meter aggregate nominal pulse spacing and at 12.0 aggregate points per meter. The aggregate nominal pulse spacing was tested on classified tiled LAS using geometrically reliable first-return points. ANPS was tested using Delaunay Triangulation that produced average point spacing between all nearest neighbors.

Hydro-flattened Bare-earth DEM Process: Class 2 (Ground) lidar points in conjunction with the hydro breaklines were used to create a 1 ft hydro-flattened Raster DEM. Using automated scripting routines within LP360, a GeoTIFF file was created for each tile. Each surface is reviewed using Global Mapper to check for any surface anomalies or incorrect elevations found within the surface.

The NOAA Office for Coastal Management (OCM) received 1995 files in tif format from the Indiana DNR for the Indiana Lake Michigan coastline. The bare earth raster files were at a 1 ft grid spacing. The data were in Indiana State Plane West NAD83(HARN), US survey feet coordinates and NAVD88 (Geoid18) elevations in feet. OCM assigned the appropriate EPSG codes (Horiz - 2968 and Vert - 6360) and copied the raster files to https for Digital Coast storage and provisioning purposes.