Summary

Description

The Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise (JALBTCX) plans to perform a coastal survey along the Gulf Coast in 2016 with funding provided by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) National Coastal Mapping Program (NCMP). The data types to be collected include bathymetric and topographic lidar point data, down-looking aerial imagery and hyperspectral imagery. The collection effort will follow the coastline and extend 500m inland and 1000m offshore or to bathymetric lidar extinction, whichever comes first. Topographic lidar data will have a nominal sub-meter post-spacing. Where water conditions permit, the bathymetric lidar data will have nominal 2m x 2m postings. Vertical accuracy of the topographic lidar data will meet or exceed RMSEZ=15 cm. Bathymetric lidar data will have a vertical accuracy of 30 cm, 2-sigma. The aerial imagery will have a pixel size approximately 20cm and the hyperspectral imagery will be provided in 1m pixels containing 36 spectral bands between 375 - 1050 nm with 19 nm bandwidth. The data will be collected on the NAD83 ellipsoid using NGS published monuments as control. Final data will be tied horizontally to NAD83 (NSRS 2007) in geographic coordinates. Vertical measurements will be converted from NAD83 ellipsoid heights in meters to NAVD88 orthometric heights using the current Geoid model at the time of acquisition. Data products from this survey effort will include topographic and bathymetric lidar point clouds in LAS format, an NAVD88 0m shoreline contour, and a series of raster data products including topo/bathy digital elevation models (DEMs), true-color aerial image mosaics, hyperspectral image mosaics, laser reflectance images and basic landcover classification images. Images of water column properties (i.e. chlorophyll and CDOM concentrations) will also be generated. Within 6 months of completing the data acquisition, these final data products will be available for public use in the absence of any unforeseen data processing delays.