South San Francisco Bay 2004 Topographic Lidar Survey: Data Overview and Preliminary Quality Assessment

The California Coastal Conservancy, in conjunction with other state and federal agencies, is collaboratively managing an effort to restore approximately 61 km2 (15,100 acres) of commercial salt evaporation ponds in South Bay to mixed intertidal habitat. In order to best develop restoration strategies, as well as to track morphologic change throughout the restoration process, a topographic lidar survey was conducted in May of 2004.

The survey collected more than 250 million elevation points in a 334 km2 area extending from just south of the San Francisco and Oakland airports to the Alviso salt ponds. This report details the collection of lidar in South Bay, the ground-truthing efforts, preliminary accuracy assessments, and known limitations of the data set. We describe the data generated from the survey and how to obtain it.