2009 US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise (JALBTCX) Bathymetric Lidar: Southern California

These files contain bathymetric lidar data collected by the SHOALS-1000T system along the coast of California. Data coverage generally extends along the coastline from the waterline offshore 1,000 meters or to laser extinction. Exclusively in areas where Fugro Pelagos acquired or planned to acquire multibeam sonar data by December 31, 2009, data coverage extends from the shoreline either to the 10-m contour, the 20-m contour or the landward extent of the multibeam data plus an additional 100 m offshore. The SHOALS system has a pulse repetition rate of 1 kHz at 532 nm (green wavelength). Native lidar data is not generally in a format accessible to most Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Specialized in-house and commercial software packages are used to process the native lidar data into 3-dimensional positions that can be imported into GIS software for visualization and further analysis. Horizontal positions, provided in decimal degrees of latitude and longitude, are referenced to the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83). Vertical positions are referenced to the NAD83 ellipsoid and provided in meters. The National Geodetic Survey's (NGS) GEOID09 model is used to transform the vertical positions from ellipsoid to orthometric heights referenced to the North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88). Both ellipsoidal and orthometric heights were provided to NOAA CSC. For data storage and Digital Coast provisioning, NOAA CSC processed the ellipsoidal height data.