Bathymetric and Supporting Data for Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri, 2020

Table Rock Lake was constructed in 1958 on the White River in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas for flood control, hydroelectric power, public water supply, and recreation. The surface area of Table Rock Lake is about 42,400 acres and approximately 715 miles of shoreline are at the conservation pool level (915 feet above the North American Vertical Datum of 1988). Sedimentation in reservoirs can result in reduced water storage capacity and a reduction in usable aquatic habitat. Therefore, accurate and up-to-date estimates of reservoir water capacity are important for managing pool levels, power generation, water supply, recreation, and downstream aquatic habitat. Many of the lakes operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are periodically surveyed to monitor bathymetric changes that affect water capacity.

During October and November 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, completed one such survey of Table Rock Lake using multibeam echosounders. The echosounder data was combined with light detection and ranging (lidar) data to prepare a bathymetric map and a surface area and capacity table. Collection of bathymetric data in October and November 2020 at Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri, used marine-based mobile mapping units that operate with several components: a multibeam echosounder (MBES) unit, an inertial navigation system (INS), and a data acquisition computer. Bathymetric data were collected using the MBES units in longitudinal transects to provide complete coverage of the lake. The MBES systems were electronically or physically tilted in some areas to improve data collection along the shoreline, in coves, and in areas that are shallower than 2.5 meters deep (the practical limit of reasonable and safe data collection with the MBES).

The bathymetric data collected during the 2020 survey (TableRockLake2020_bathy_pts.zip) were gridded on a 6.56-foot (2-meter) grid using the Combined Uncertainty and Bathymetry Estimator (CUBE) method and were the source of points to create the bathymetric surface of the lake. The gridded bathymetric point data were quality-assured with data from 42 selected resurvey areas (TableRockLake2020_QA_raw.zip) to test the accuracy of the gridded bathymetric point data. The two bathymetry datasets are provided as comma-delimited text files that have been compressed into zip archives. Attribute/column labels of each dataset are described in the "Entity and attribute" section of the metadata file.