Summary

Description

These files contain topographic lidar data collected by the Compact Hydrographic Airborne Rapid Total Survey (CHARTS) system along the coast of North Carolina near the town of Duck. CHARTS integrates topographic and bathymetric lidar sensors, a digital camera and a hyperspectral scanner on a single remote sensing platform for use in coastal mapping and charting activities. Data coverage generally extends along the coastline from the waterline inland 500 meters (topography) and offshore 1,000 meters or to laser extinction (bathymetry), however, no bathymetry was collected for this data set. 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. 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) GEOID03 model is used to transform the vertical positions from ellipsoid to orthometric heights referenced to the North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88). The 3-D position data are sub-divided into a series of ASCII file products, with each covering approximately 5 kilometers of shoreline. The ASCII columns are Longitude, Latitude, UTM Zone, Easting, Northing, Elevation (orthometric), Elevation (ellipsoid), Date, Time, and Intensity. ASCII data were transformed to LAS format in ellipsoid heights.