High-resolution land cover mapping along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts to enhance hurricane coastal impact models

To enhance hurricane coastal impact models, we developed 1-m land cover maps for the coastal portions of states along the Gulf of America and Atlantic coasts using recent (2018–2020) high-resolution orthoimagery and moderate-resolution land cover maps. Our first step was to develop land cover maps with three classes (vegetated, unvegetated, water) using recently acquired 1-m orthoimagery. These simple three-class maps were then integrated with 10-m and 30-m land cover maps from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP). The resulting products have a 1-m resolution with enhanced thematic detail (i.e., expanding from three classes to 23 classes used in the C-CAP maps). We conducted minor editing, such as removal of swash from shorelines, of these land cover fusion products and assessed the accuracy of the products using randomly generated points and photointerpretation.