Publications

Coastal inundation has been identified as an important natural hazard that affects densely populated and built-up areas (Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction, 2008). Inundation, or coastal flooding, can result from various physical processes, including storm surges, tsunamis, intense precipitation events, and extreme high tides. Such events cause quickly rising water levels. When rapidly rising wate

Over the past five to ten years the use and applicability of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology has increased dramatically. As a result, more and more LiDAR data now are being collected across the country for a wide range of applications, and LiDAR currently is the technology of choice for high resolution terrain model creation, 3-D city and infrastructure modeling, forestry, and a wid

In late 2009, a $14.3 million allocation from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) for new light detection and ranging (lidar) elevation data acquisition prompted the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Geospatial Program (NGP) to develop a common minimum specification for all lidar data acquired for The National Map. Released as a working draft in 2010 and formally published in 20

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Hurricane Katrina was one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history. Due to the sheer size of the affected areas, an unprecedented regional analysis at very high resolution and accuracy was needed to properly quantify and understand the effects of the hurricane and the storm tide. Many disparate sources of lidar data were acquired and processed for varying environmental reasons by pre- and

In 1996, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed a global topographic elevation model designated as GTOPO30 at a horizontal resolution of 30 arc-seconds for the entire Earth. Because no single source of topographic information covered the entire land surface, GTOPO30 was derived from eight raster and vector sources that included a substantial amount of U.S. Defense Mapping Agency data. The qua

Recent flood events in the Prairie Pothole Region of North America have stimulated interest in modeling water storage capacities of wetlands and their surrounding catchments to facilitate flood mitigation efforts. Accurate estimates of basin storage capacities have been hampered by a lack of high-resolution elevation data. In this paper, we developed a 0.5 m bare-earth model from Light Detection A

Since the days of MacArthur, three-dimensional (3-D) structural information on the environment has fundamentally transformed scientific understanding of ecological phenomena (MacArthur and MacArthur 1961). Early data on ecosystem structure were painstakingly laborious to collect. However, as reviewed and reported in recent volumes of Frontiers(eg Vierling et al. 2008; Asner et al.2011), advances i

Supported by NASA's Earth Surface and Interior (ESI) Program, we are producing a global set of Ground Control Points (GCPs) derived from the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) altimetry data. From February of 2003, to October of 2009, ICESat obtained nearly global measurements of land topography (+/- 86deg latitudes) with unprecedented accuracy, sampling the Earth's surface at discre

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