NOAA Topobathymetric Lidar DEM: Gwynn to Newport News, VA, 2019

964.624 square kilometers of coastal and submerged topography for the Chesapeake Bay area, collected by NV5 Geospatial, Inc. for NOAA in 15 missions between February and April 2019. The final product includes 53 digital elevation models (DEMs) with 1-meter pixel resolution, derived from classified lidar point clouds. Data points are classified according to ASPRS standards, including ground, water column, and bathymetric bottom categories.

Use Cases

• Modeling coastal erosion and inundation based on detailed ground and bathymetric elevation data.
• Analyzing submerged feature topography based on classifications for bathymetric bottom and submerged features.
• Studying water column properties based on lidar returns classified within the water column.
• Creating high-resolution base maps for coastal management based on the 1-meter pixel DEMs.

Strengths

• Covers approximately 964.624 square kilometers with detailed topographic and bathymetric data.
• Point clouds include multiple attributes such as lidar intensity, number of returns, return number, time, and scan angle.
• Final DEMs have a high 1-meter pixel resolution and are transformed to geoidal height (Geoid12b).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific analytical tasks.

Provenance

Source

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce

Collection Method

Data collected by NV5 Geospatial, Inc. using a Riegl VQ-880-GH lidar system from an airplane.

Time Range

2019-02-17 to 2019-04 12

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 21:07:59.273657; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Portion of the Chesapeake Bay and nearby census designated places in Virginia, USA.