About the LiDAR - Light Detection And Ranging
Key to our interpretation of Carolina bay morphology is the visualization of their true planforms, as seen in high resolution DEMs. Bare-earth elevation data has been extracted from LiDAR point-cloud data provided by government agencies through public access data sites. The Global Mapper commercial GIS platform has been used to process all LiDAR data and generate the intriguing landscape shown here. False color shader is HSV, with elevations exaggerated by 20x to punch up the relief. Global Mapper’s ability to generate tiled image sets with KML linkages has been leveraged to integrate the imagery into the Google Earth virtual globe environment. When loaded by a user, the seed KML file is only ~1kb. These seeds are interrogated by Google Earth, and based on the user’s field-of-view, the Google Earth application contacts our server and downloads images with the appropriate resolution from the tile set. This is the identical process used by Google Earth to load increasingly-higher resolution maps as a user zooms into the globe, keeping the system responsive and reducing load times and bandwidth needs for the image data.
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