NOAA NGS Lidar: Topobathymetric Point Cloud for Trappe to Toddville, MD (2018-2019)

A portion of the Chesapeake Bay and nearby census designated places in Maryland, covering approximately 564 square kilometers. The dataset consists of 2,909 LAS tiles of topobathymetric lidar point cloud data collected by NV5 Geospatial for NOAA between November 2018 and April 2019. Points are classified according to ASPRS standards, including ground, water column, and bathymetric bottom.

Use Cases

• Modeling coastal erosion and sediment transport based on classified ground and bathymetric bottom points.
• Analyzing submerged topography and habitat mapping based on bathymetric and submerged feature classifications.
• Creating digital elevation models (DEMs) for flood risk assessment based on ground and water surface points.
• Calibrating hydrodynamic models using water column and bathymetric data points.

Strengths

• Data collection spanned 14 missions over a 5-month period, suggesting temporal consistency checks.
• Points include multiple attributes such as lidar intensity, number of returns, return number, time, and scan angle.
• The dataset is organized into 2,909 consistently sized 500m x 500m LAS tiles.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count (total points) is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale processing.

Provenance

Source

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce

Collection Method

Collected by NV5 Geospatial using Riegl VQ-880-G, VQ-880-GII, and VQ-880-GH lidar systems from an airplane.

Time Range

2018-11-07 to 2019-04-17

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 21:31:02.678821; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Chesapeake Bay area from Trappe to Toddville, Maryland, USA, including Taylors Island, Cambridge, Madison, Woolford, and Algonquin.