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U.S. Geological Survey
Open-File Report 2005-1284
Version 1.0

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

By Amy C. Foxgrover and Bruce E. Jaffe

2005
ABSTRACT

Tidal wetlands in South San Francisco Bay (South Bay) have decreased by over 80% in the past 150 years. 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. In addition, we present maps and sample imagery that provides a revealing look into the intricate topographic features of South Bay.

Full Text

Download this 57-page report as a PDF document (7.1 MB)

Enlarged View of Map

Figure 8 of this report is a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the South San Francisco Bay Area. This file was made from an uncompressed TIF file. The PDF was made using Zip compression that is a non-data-loss compression method. The resulting file is large but of both high-resolution and high sharpness.

thumbnail view of map

Download , a larger version of Figure 8, as a 36" x 28" PDF document (34.6 MB)

For questions about the content of this report, contact Amy Foxgrover

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URL of this page: http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2005/1284/
Maintained by: Michael Diggles
Date created: August 2, 2005
Date last modified: August 17, 2005 (mfd)