Western Shore LiDAR

DESCRIPTION
Following completion of the Eastern Shore LiDAR project, the state of Maryland awarded a subsequent task to acquire and process LiDAR for several counties on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland including Carroll, Howard, Anne Arundel, St. Mary's and Charles counties. SSA was responsible for procuring services to acquire this data and then for managing the procurement process and processing of the data into the specified deliverables. Accuracy on this project averaged about 9cm RMSE, which is exceptional relative to the FEMA requirements.

Following processing of the data and confirming the quality based on our first order GPS field work, SSA further refined the data to provide the required deliverables:

• First Returns
• Last Return
• Bare Earth Mass Points
• A reflectivity model
• And 2-foot contours for several of the counties

Data was delivered on schedule and budget. This data has formed the basis for analysis and contour generation by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, NOAA, and the several counties that participated in the effort. SSA was given the responsibility by Carroll, Howard, Anne Arundel, and Charles Counties to develop contours for them from the bare earth mass point deliverable. A triangulated irregular network (TIN) was generated from the data and processed with tools that were custom built by SSA to ensure that contours delivered did not violate the 1/2" contour variance rule established by USGS.