High-Resolution Lidar Topography of the Puget Lowland, Washington —A Bonanza for Earth Science

Abstract

More than 10,000 km 2 of high-resolution, public-domain topography acquired by the Puget Sound Lidar Consortium is revolutionizing investigations of active faulting, continental glaciation, landslides, and surficial processes in the seismically active Puget Lowland. The Lowland-the population and economic center of the Pacific Northwest-presents special problems for hazards investigations, with its young glacial topography, dense forest cover, and urbanization. Lidar mapping during leaf-off conditions has led to a detailed digital model of the landscape beneath the forest canopy. The surface thus revealed contains a rich and diverse record of previously unknown surface-rupturing faults, deep-seated landslides, uplifted Holocene and Pleistocene beaches, and subglacial and periglacial features. More than half a dozen suspected postglacial fault scarps have been identified to date. Five scarps that have been trenched show evidence of large, Holocene, surfacerupturing earthquakes.

Quaternary geology of the Middle Aterno Valley, 2009 L'Aquila earthquake area (Abruzzi Apennines, Italy)

“…Due to its sub-meter resolution, LiDAR is one of the most useful remotely sensed datasets for the representation of landscape morphology and lithology, as well as for the identification and characterization of potentially active faults, since it has the potential to detect subtle tectonic signatures, especially in areas of dense vegetation (e.g. Arrowsmith & Zielke, 2009;Brunori, Civico, Cinti, & Ventura, 2013;Cunningham et al, 2006;Haugerud et al, 2003;Hilley, DeLong, Prentice, Blisniuk, & Arrowsmith, 2010;Hunter, Howle, Rose, & Bawden, 2011;Lin, Kaneda, Mukoyama, Asada, & Chiba, 2013). Vertical and horizontal errors associated with the available LiDAR acquisition are less than 0.2 m and 0.5 m, respectively.…”

Now You See It… Now You Don’t: Understanding Airborne Mapping LiDAR Collection and Data Product Generation for Archaeological Research in Mesoamerica

“…In certain applications such as forestry [40,41] and bathymetry [42] FWD systems have distinct advantages over discrete return systems, although in forestry the discrete data still provides abundant information [43,44]. Other uses such as the mapping of large scale topographic features (faults, landslides) have been successful for decades with discrete return systems even when the terrain features of interest are occluded by dense vegetation [45]. FWD systems can provide additional information and improved vertical resolution not available with discrete systems; it is a matter of analyzing the cost/benefit trade-off for a given application.…”

Use of LIDAR in landslide investigations: a review

“…The morphological features of the landslides (e.g. scarps, mobilized material, foot) are easy to delineate based on hillshades of the produced HRDEM (Carter et al 2001;Haugerud et al 2003;Ardizzone et al 2007;Jaboyedoff et al 2008a;Corsini et al 2009). This approach does not replace field investigations, but it changes the fieldwork methods, which become part of the validation processes of a landslide inventory produced by HRDEM analysis (Fig.…”

“…Recent advances in sensor electronics and data treatment make these techniques affordable. The two major remote sensing techniques that are exponentially developing in landslides investigation are interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) (Fruneau et al 1996;Colesanti et al 2003;Squarzoni et al 2003), and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) (Carter et al 2001;Slob et al 2002;Haugerud et al 2003;Slob and Hack 2004). InSAR techniques are usually ground-based (Stow 1996;Tarchi et al 2003) or satellite-based (Carnec et al 1996;Singhroy 2009), and only rarely airborne.…”