Data Management Plan

No metadata record was provided with the data. This record is populated with information from the Quantum Spatial, Inc. technical report downloaded from the Washington Dept. of Natural Resources Washington Lidar Portal.

In 2014 WSI, a Quantum Spatial (QSI) company, was contracted by Washington State Department of Natural Resources (Washington DNR) to collect Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data in the Willapa River Valley site in Pacific and Lewis County in southwest Washington. The initial delivery (delivery 1) occurred in April 2014 and was for 35,472 acres. Due to weather and resource constraints, the remaining acquisition (delivery 2) was completed in December 2014 during leaf-off season.

In addition to these lidar point data, the bare earth Digital Elevation Models (DEM) created from the lidar point data 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 NOAA Office for Coastal Management (OCM) downloaded the laz files from the Washington Lidar Portal.

Process Steps:

• The LiDAR survey was accomplished using a Leica ALS70 system mounted in a Caravan and Partenavia aircraft. Table 6 summarizes the settings used to yield an average pulse density of greater than or equal to 8 pulses/m2 over the Willapa River Valley project area. The Leica ALS70 laser system can record unlimited range measurements (returns) per pulse, but typically does not record more than 5 returns per pulse . It is not uncommon for some types of surfaces (e.g., dense vegetation or water) to return fewer pulses to the LiDAR sensor than the laser originally emitted. The discrepancy between first return and overall delivered density will vary depending on terrain, land cover, and the prevalence of water bodies. All discernible laser returns were processed for the output dataset.
• All areas were surveyed with an opposing flight line side-lap of greater than or equal to 50% (greater than or equal to 100% overlap) in order to reduce laser shadowing and increase surface laser painting. To accurately solve for laser point position (geographic coordinates x, y and z), the positional coordinates of the airborne sensor and the attitude of the aircraft were recorded continuously throughout the LiDAR data collection mission. Position of the aircraft was measured twice per second (2 Hz) by an on-board differential GPS unit, and aircraft attitude was measured 200 times per second (200 Hz) as pitch, roll and yaw (heading) from an on-board inertial measurement unit (IMU). To allow for post-processing correction and calibration, aircraft and sensor position and attitude data are indexed by GPS time.
• Upon completion of data acquisition, QSI processing staff initiated a suite of automated and manual techniques to process the data into the requested deliverables. Processing tasks included GPS control computations, smoothed best estimate trajectory (SBET) calculations, kinematic corrections, calculation of laser point position, sensor and data calibration for optimal relative and absolute accuracy, and LiDAR point classification. Processing methodologies were tailored for the landscape. Brief descriptions of these tasks are below. IPAS TC v.3.1, Waypoint Inertial Explorer v.8.5 Resolve kinematic corrections for aircraft position data using kinematic aircraft GPS and static ground GPS data. Develop a smoothed best estimate of trajectory (SBET) file that blends post-processed aircraft position with sensor head position and attitude recorded throughout the survey. ALS Post Processing Software v.2.75 Calculate laser point position by associating SBET position to each laser point return time, scan angle, intensity, etc. Create raw laser point cloud data for the entire survey in *.las (ASPRS v. 1.2) format. Convert data to orthometric elevations by applying a geoid correction. TerraScan v.14 Import raw laser points into manageable blocks (less than 500 MB) to perform manual relative accuracy calibration and filter erroneous points. Classify ground points for individual flight lines. TerraMatch v.14 Using ground classified points per each flight line, test the relative accuracy. Perform automated line-to-line calibrations for system attitude parameters (pitch, roll, heading), mirror flex (scale) and GPS/IMU drift. Calculate calibrations on ground classified points from paired flight lines and apply results to all points in a flight line. Use every flight line for relative accuracy calibration. TerraScan v.14, TerraModeler v.14 Classify resulting data to ground and other client designated ASPRS classifications.
• 2022-03-03 00:00:00 - The NOAA Office for Coastal Management (OCM) downloaded this data set from the Washington Lidar Portal. The total number of files downloaded and processed was 238. No metadata record was provided with the data. This record is populated with information from the Quantum Spatial, Inc. technical report downloaded from the Washington Dept. of Natural Resources Washington Lidar Portal. The data were in Washington State Plane South (NAD83 HARN), US survey feet coordinates and NAVD88 (Geoid03) elevations in feet. From the provided report, the data were classified as: 1 - Unclassified, 2 - Ground. OCM processed all classifications of points to the Digital Coast Data Access Viewer (DAV). Classes available in the DAV are: 1, 2. OCM performed the following processing on the data for Digital Coast storage and provisioning purposes: 1. An internal OCM script was run to check the number of points by classification and by flight ID and the gps and intensity ranges. 2. Internal OCM scripts were run on the laz files to convert from orthometric (NAVD88) elevations to ellipsoid elevations using the Geoid03 model, to convert from Washington State Plane South (NAD83 HARN), US survey feet coordinates to geographic coordinates, to convert from elevations in feet to meters, to assign the geokeys, to sort the data by gps time and zip the data to database and to the Amazon s3 bucket.

Data is available online for bulk and custom downloads.

Data is backed up to tape and to cloud storage.