Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/103965
NOAA COASTAL SERVICES CENTER Industry Trends A point cloud of the Grand Coulee Dam is viewed in a GIS and symbolized relative to height above ground (which helps to accentuate power lines). The data were collected between 2009-2010 as part of the Columbia River LiDAR Survey Project and will be used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to support hydraulic modeling work associated with proposed 2014 Columbia River treaty negotiations. JESSE ALLEN AND ROBERT SIMMON/DATA FROM MICHAEL LEFSKY industry-standard LAS format, real-time classification of LiDAR points can be done directly on source files and immediately applied to people's geospatial work. Tools and filters can be applied to improve the depiction of surfaces, just as it can be done with 2-D imagery. Previously the domain of specialty software, those capabilities now have coalesced into a single-view workstation framework where all the major work can be done without opening multiple task-specific applications. Civic Application Traditional GIS features, such as tax parcels and streets, provide valuable information about the x,y coordinatebased world, but what do they really tell about the world above? Today, more cities are using 3-D capture and running sophisticated analyses to improve civic responsibilities such as tax assessment. For example, by comparing parcel datasets of the same suburban region taken years apart, LiDAR enables easy identification of new buildings and construction where height differences appear. Cities today now can compare property parcels that have construction permits with those that don't. From such techniques, cities can enforce permitting in an accurate and quantifiable way. It takes time and effort—two resources few can spare in a stressed global economy—to detect such changes with manual methods and footwork. Teams of assessors would have to canvass an area and record observations. The numbers would have been harder to crunch. But working with LiDAR data—in software already suited to the task of creating, analyzing and serving spatial information—can literally enable local governments to find missing tax revenue in a matter of hours. Disaster Preparation and Recovery A map shows the building-height differences between 2008 and 2012 LiDAR datasets. 24 G E O W O R L D / J A N U A R Y 2 O 1 3 The application of LiDAR can be seen in emergency management when land changes such as Hurricane Sandy result in significant property loss. A landscape recorded in LiDAR before and after a storm can yield much more data than traditional optics, simply by virtue of the resolution of all the millions of points that LiDAR lasers collect. And because when the next disaster will occur can never be predicted, a continually captured Imagery/LIDAR Special Issue