Coastal Lidar and Radar Imaging System (CLARIS) Lidar Data Report

An analysis of shoreline change, dune volume, beach volume, beach slope, and cumulative elevation change along the northern Outer Banks of North Carolina near the CHL Field Research Facility over a 6-year study period.

Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, Mississippi

The dynamic nature of the nation's coastlines necessitates frequent shoreline monitoring and mapping. The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL), Field Research Facility (FRF), has collected datasets on the nearshore zone's changing conditions for over 40 years. During the course of these efforts, CHL has continued to develop different technologies to refine shoreline monitoring techniques, with a particular focus on the application of remote sensing technology to coastal monitoring. Light detection and ranging (lidar) scanners have proven useful for the CHL coastal measurement efforts, providing highly detailed data of coastal change and hydrodynamic processes.

Lidar is frequently collected from stationary ground-based platforms, which provide fine detail (100s to 1000s of points per meter) in one location or mobile airborne sampling approaches that provide coverage over large areas but at lower resolution (1 to 10s of points per meter). The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) formed the Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of eXpertise in 1998 to support coastal mapping requirements and committed to surveying the U.S. coastline every 5 years with airborne lidar. As a result of these and other efforts, coastal monitoring with airborne lidar data has provided a range of insights into coastal change since the late 1990s.