2010 US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise (JALBTCX) Topobathy Lidar: Alabama Coast and Florida Gulf Coast

These files contain topographic and bathymetric lidar data collected by the HawkEye system along the coast of Alabama and the gulf coast of Florida. The data were collected January - March 2010. The area of coverage includes the coastline in Baldwin and Mobile Counties in Alabama and the following Florida counties: Bay, Escambia, Franklin, Gulf, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, and Walton. HawkEye integrates topographic and bathymetric lidar sensors with a digital camera on a single remote sensing platform for use in coastal mapping and charting activities. The topographic lidar sensor has a pulse repetition rate of 64 kHZ at 1064 nm (red wavelength). The bathymetric lidar sensor has a pulse repetition rate of 4 kHz at 532 nm (green wavelength). Native lidar data is not generally in a format accessible to most GIS systems. Specialized in-house and commercial software packages are used to process the native lidar data into 3-D positions that can be imported into GIS software for visualization and further analysis. The data were provided to NOAA CSC in decimal degrees of latitude and longitude, referenced to the NAD83 ellipsoid and in meters. The National Geodetic Survey's (NGS) GEOID03 model was used to transform the vertical positions from ellipsoid to orthometric heights referenced to the North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88). The format of the file was LAS version 1.0. For data storage and Digital Coast provisioning purposes, NOAA CSC converted the orthometric heights (NAVD88) back to ellipsoidal heights using GEOID03.