2025 City of Richmond Lidar DEM: Richmond, VA

Product: These are Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data as part of the required deliverables for the lidar project. Class 2 (Ground) lidar points in conjunction with the hydro breaklines were used to create a 1 ft hydro-flattened Raster DEM.

Geographic Extent: The City of Richmond and parts of Chesterfield and Henrico Counties in Virginia, covering approximately 117 square miles.

Dataset Description: The lidar project called for the Planning, Acquisition, processing and derivative products of lidar data to be collected at a nominal pulse spacing (NPS) of 0.35 meters. Project specifications are based on the U.S. Geological Survey National Geospatial Program Lidar Base Specification 2024, Revision A. Lidar data was delivered as processed Classified LAS 1.4 files, formatted to 2083 individual 1250 ft x 1250 ft tiles clipped to the DPA, as tiled bare-earth DEMs and as tiled all-return MSHRs; all tiled to the same 1250 ft x 1250 ft schema.

Ground Conditions: Lidar was collected in February/March 2025, while no snow was on the ground and rivers were at or below normal levels. In order to post process the lidar data to meet task order specifications and meet ASPRS vertical accuracy guidelines, Sanborn Map Company, Inc., established a total of 24 ground control points that were used to calibrate the lidar to known ground locations established throughout the project area.

These data were provided to the NOAA Office for Coastal Management (OCM) from the City of Richmond, VA for the purpose of making the data publicly available for custom and bulk downloads from the NOAA Digital Coast Data Access Viewer.

To acquire detailed surface elevation data for use in conservation planning, design, research, floodplain mapping, dam safety assessments and elevation modeling, etc. Classified LAS files are used to show the manually reviewed bare earth surface. This allows the user to create Breaklines and Raster DEM. The purpose of these lidar data was to produce high accuracy 3D hydro-flattened Digital Elevation Model (DEM) with a 1 ft cell size. These lidar point cloud data were used to create 3D breaklines, hydro-flattened DEMs, and all-return MSHRs as necessary.

Raster File Type = TIFF

Bit Depth/Pixel Type = 32-bit float

Raster Cell Size = 1 ft

Interpolation or Resampling Technique = Bilinear Interpolation

Required Vertical Accuracy = 19.6 cm NVA

Any conclusions drawn from the analysis of this information are not the responsibility of NOAA, the Office for Coastal Management or its partners.

To the extent possible under law, the U.S. Government has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this dataset.

Data is available online for bulk and custom downloads.

None

Users should be aware that temporal changes may have occurred since this data set was collected and some parts of this data may no longer represent actual surface conditions. Users should not use this data for critical applications without a full awareness of its limitations.

This data set was compiled to meet ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standard for Digital Geospatial Data (2014) for a 10-cm RMSEz Vertical Accuracy Class.

Datasets contain complete coverage of tiles. No points have been removed or excluded. A visual qualitative assessment was performed to ensure data completeness. There are no void areas or missing data. The raw point cloud is of good quality and data passes Non-Vegetated Vertical Accuracy specifications.

Data covers the AOI specified for this project.

The NOAA Office for Coastal Management (OCM) received the GeoTIFF files from the City of Richmond, VA.