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Full catalog/COASTAL LIDAR
COASTAL LIDAR·dataset

Laser 3D elevation scans of US coasts (NOAA)

NOAA Coastal Lidar Data
land NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Detailed 3D point clouds of the land surface and objects along US coastlines, captured by laser pulses that record the exact position of whatever they bounce off.

How it's made. Collected by NOAA from many airborne lidar surveys and provided in streamable point-cloud formats, each project kept in its own coordinate system.

How & where you'd use it. Valuable for mapping coastal elevation, planning for flooding and storms, and disaster response; users should take care when combining separate projects.

What's measured

aws-pdsclimateelevationdisaster responsegeospatiallidarstac

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

Lidar (light detection and ranging) is a technology that can measure the 3-dimentional location of objects, including the solid earth surface. The data consists of a point cloud of the positions of solid objects that reflected a laser pulse, typically from an airborne platform. In addition to the position, each point may also be attributed by the type of object it reflected from, the intensity of the reflection, and other system dependent metadata. The NOAA Coastal Lidar Data is a collection of lidar projects from many different sources and agencies, geographically focused on the coastal areas of the United States of America. The data is provided in Entwine Point Tiles (EPT; https://entwine.io) format, which is a lossless streamable octree of the point cloud, and in LAZ format. Datasets are maintained in their original projects and care should be taken when merging projects. The coordinate reference system for the data is The NAD83(2011) UTM zone appropriate for the center of each data set for EPT and geographic coordinates for LAZ. Vertically they are in the orthometric datum appropriate for that area (for example, NAVD88 in the mainland United States, PRVD02 in Puerto Rico, or GUVD03 in Guam). The geoid model used is reflected in the data set resource name. The data are organized under directories entwine and laz for the EPT and LAZ versions respectively. Some datasets are not in EPT format, either because the dataset is already in EPT on the USGS public lidar site, they failed to build or their content does not work well in EPT format. Topobathy lidar datasets using the

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).