- NOAA is responsible for establishing the legal National Shoreline.
- The researchers compared an expensive GPS survey method with a Monte Carlo simulation of the errors in a LiDAR-based approach.
- They found good correlation of the results from both methods.
Over the past decade, NOAA has made significant advancements in shoreline mapping, including developing, testing, and implementing airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) shoreline mapping procedures. NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey has a mandate to map the tide-datum-based National Shoreline, which many agencies use for legal purposes and navigation.
In this paper the authors compare a high precision and high cost manual GPS/laser level approach with a Monte Carlo computer simulation to estimate the errors in each observable in the LiDAR system. They found good agreement between the two approaches.
Uncertainties on the order of 1.0 – 1.5 m (95%) were found for most of the shore with a strong correlation between the level of uncertainty and the shoreline slope. This is a short, but valuable paper.
