2007 Oregon Trout Lidar: Lower Salmon River, OR

Create custom data files by choosing data area, product type, map projection, file format, datum, etc. A new metadata will be produced to reflect your request using this record as a base. Change to an orthometric vertical datum is one of the many options.

Bulk download of data files in LAZ format, geographic coordinates, orthometric heights. Note that the vertical datum (hence elevations) of the files here are different than described in this document. They will be in an orthometric datum.

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 the Watershed Sciences, Inc. Technical Lidar Report from the DOGAMI Lidar Viewer.

Link to custom download, from the Data Access Viewer (DAV), the raster Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data that were created from this lidar data set.

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.

Acquisition:

The LiDAR survey utilized a Leica ALS50 Phase II sensor mounted in a Cessna Caravan 208B. The Leica ALS50 Phase II system was set to acquire greater than or equal to 105,000 laser pulses per second (i.e. 105 kHz pulse rate) and flown at 900 meters above ground level (AGL), capturing a scan angle of ±14 degrees from nadir. These settings were developed to yield points with an average native density of greater than or equal to 8 points per square meter over terrestrial surfaces. The native pulse density is the number of pulses emitted by the LiDAR system. Some types of surfaces (i.e., dense vegetation or water) may return fewer pulses than the laser originally emitted. Therefore, the delivered density can be less than the native density and vary according to distribution of terrain, land cover and water bodies.

The completed areas were surveyed with opposing flight line side-lap of greater than or equal to 50% (greater than or equal to 100% overlap) to reduce laser shadowing and increase surface laser painting. The system allows up to four range measurements per pulse, and all discernable laser returns were processed for the output dataset. To solve for laser point position, an accurate description of aircraft position and attitude is vital. Aircraft position is described as x, y, and z and measured twice per second (2 Hz) by an onboard differential GPS unit. Aircraft attitude is measured 200 times per second (200 Hz) as pitch, roll, and yaw (heading) from an onboard inertial measurement unit (IMU).

The Salmon River study area was flown on May 18th and 19th, 2007 in conjunction with data collection on the Upper Salmon for the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI). The AOI flown for Oregon Trout has been acquired and processed using the same methodology as the DOGAMI data set for the purpose of compatibility.

Ground Survey:

During the LiDAR survey of the study area, a static (1 Hz recording frequency) ground survey was conducted over monuments with known coordinates. After the airborne survey, the static GPS data are processed using triangulation with CORS stations and checked against the Online Positioning User Service (OPUS) to quantify daily variance. Multiple sessions are processed over the same monument to confirm antenna height measurements and position accuracy.

Multiple DGPS units are used for the ground real-time kinematic (RTK) portion of the survey. To collect accurate ground surveyed points, a GPS base unit is set up over monuments to broadcast a kinematic correction to a roving GPS unit. The ground crew uses a roving unit to receive radio-relayed kinematic corrected positions from the base unit. This method is referred to as real-time kinematic (RTK) surveying and allows precise location measurement (sigma less than or equal to 1.5 cm - 0.6 in). For the Salmon River study area, 323 RTK points were collected in the vicinity and compared to LiDAR data for accuracy assessment.

Laser Point Processing:

Laser point coordinates were computed using the IPAS and ALS Post Processor software suites based on independent data from the LiDAR system (pulse time, scan angle), and aircraft trajectory data (SBET). Laser point returns (first through fourth) were assigned an associated (x, y, and z) coordinate along with unique intensity values (0-255). The data were output into large LAS v. 1.1 files; each point maintaining the corresponding scan angle, return number (echo), intensity, and x, y, and z (easting, northing, and elevation) information. These initial laser point files were too large to process. To facilitate laser point processing, bins (polygons) were created to divide the dataset into manageable sizes (< 500 MB). Flightlines and LiDAR data were then reviewed to ensure complete coverage of the study area and positional accuracy of the laser points. Once the laser point data were imported into bins in TerraScan, a manual calibration was performed to assess the system offsets for pitch, roll, heading and mirror scale. Using a geometric relationship developed by Watershed Sciences, each of these offsets was resolved and corrected if necessary. The LiDAR points were then filtered for noise, pits and birds by screening for absolute elevation limits, isolated points and height above ground. Each bin was then inspected for pits and birds manually, and spurious points were removed. For a bin containing approximately 7.5-9.0 million points, an average of 50-100 points were typically found to be artificially low or high. These spurious non-terrestrial laser points must be removed from the dataset. Common sources of non-terrestrial returns are clouds, birds, vapor, and haze. Internal calibration was refined using TerraMatch. Points from overlapping lines were tested for internal consistency and final adjustments made for system misalignments (i.e., pitch, roll, heading offsets and mirror scale). Automated sensor attitude and scale corrections yielded 3-5 cm improvements in the relative accuracy. Once the system misalignments were corrected, vertical GPS drift was resolved and removed per flight line, yielding a slight improvement (<1 cm) in relative accuracy. In summary, the data must complete a robust calibration designed to reduce inconsistencies from multiple sources (i.e. sensor attitude offsets, mirror scale, GPS drift). The TerraScan software suite is designed specifically for classifying near-ground points (Soininen 2004). The processing sequence began with removal of all points not near the earth based on geometric constraints used to evaluate multi-return points. The resulting bare earth (ground) model was visually inspected and additional ground point modeling was performed in site-specific areas (over a 50-meter radius) to improve ground detail. This was only done in areas with known ground modeling deficiencies, such as bedrock outcrops, cliffs, deeply incised stream banks, and dense vegetation. In some cases, ground point classification included known vegetation (i.e., understory, low/dense shrubs, etc.) and these points were manually reclassified as non-grounds. Ground surface rasters were developed from triangulated irregular networks (TINs) of ground points.

The NOAA Office for Coastal Management (OCM) received 14 laz files from Oregon DOGAMI. The files were in OR State Plane North, NAD83 HARN, International feet coordinates and were in NAVD88 (Geoid03) elevations in US survey feet. The point classifications were: 1- Unclassified, 2 - Ground. OCM processed all classifications of points to the Digital Coast Data Access Viewer (DAV). Classes available on the DAV are: 1,2. No metadata record was provided with the data. This record is populated with information from the Watershed Sciences, Inc. technical report provided by OR DOGAMI.

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 OR State Plane North, NAD83 HARN, international feet coordinates to geographic coordinates, to convert from vertical units of feet to meters, to assign the geokeys, to sort the data by gps time and zip the data to database and to AWS S3.