Lidar for America's Infrastructure: The 3D Elevation Program

By Vicki Lukas and William J. Carswell, Jr. USGS Fact Sheet 2016–3093, November 2016.

Infrastructure needs good terrain data

Infrastructure — transportation, energy, communications, water supply and other systems — and the construction management that builds it are vital to national prosperity. The American Society of Civil Engineers (2013) rated U.S. infrastructure fair to poor, needing large, urgent investment to maintain, modernize and make it resilient.

3D lidar elevation data bring productivity, safety and cost savings to such projects. But buying it project by project adds cost and risk and distracts from the work. The USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) provides the data instead, through partnerships that pool funding, contracts with experienced mapping firms, standards and expertise, and free public access.

Denver, Colorado, as a lidar point cloud (top) and a bare-earth elevation model (bottom). Image: Jason Stoker, USGS.

Uses in infrastructure

• route, grade, line-of-sight and utility surveys, and corridor mapping;
• finding terrain and obstructions for aviation;
• modeling dam, levee and coastal-structure failure;
• hydraulic and hydrologic modeling;
• natural-hazard and geotechnical evaluations;
• permits and construction plans;
• drainage and cut-and-fill estimates;
• vegetation and landform analysis;
• as-built models, preliminary engineering and quantity estimates;
• base maps and elevation models.

Site-specific mobile and stationary lidar can be added where needed.

Benefits: safer crews, who spend less time in hazardous places; far more detail from dense measurements; faster, cheaper data capture; and full coverage of large or inaccessible sites.

What it is worth

Conservative annual national benefits of 3DEP data for infrastructure and related business uses:

That is about $170 million a year, 25 percent of the $690 million in conservative new benefits from 3DEP across all business uses. Using the data only for infrastructure would forgo the other 75 percent. The potential across the economy is $13 billion a year.

The 3D Elevation Program

3DEP is a national USGS program collecting high-resolution elevation data — point clouds, bare-earth DEMs and more. Now operational, its goal as of 2016 was complete quality level 2 lidar for the conterminous U.S., Hawaii and the territories, and IfSAR radar for Alaska, by the end of 2023.

A national program:

• cuts acquisition costs by about 25 percent through scale;
• lets Federal, State, Tribal, territorial and local partners plan ahead and "buy up" to better data;
• gives consistent coverage across project, jurisdictional and watershed lines;
• supplies contracts, specifications and quality assurance, so partners can focus on their own work.

The data:

• Lidar: quality level 2 means pulses at most 0.7 meters apart and a vertical error of 10 centimeters, collected within the past eight years (Lidar Base Specification).
• Alaska: quality level 5 IfSAR (vertical error 185 centimeters), surface models, intensity images and 5-meter DEMs.
• Products: classified point clouds and bare-earth DEMs with flattened water. Seamless national DEMs at 1/3, 1 and 2 arc-seconds; a 1-meter DEM seamless within each project.
• Access: part of The National Map, free and unrestricted, with point-query services; download at the National Map viewer.

Working with 3DEP

A project's data may already exist, ready to use without processing raw lidar. Where new data are needed, 3DEP offers pooled funding, qualified contractors, USGS contract and distribution expertise, the chance to buy up, and sometimes cost-share funding. Partners can fund USGS-managed projects, receive cooperative funds (mainly through the Broad Agency Announcement), use USGS contracts or contribute existing data. See the 3DEP website; questions to 3DEP@usgs.gov.

Sources

Based on The 3D Elevation Program and America's Infrastructure, by Vicki Lukas and William J. Carswell, Jr., USGS Fact Sheet 2016–3093, U.S. Geological Survey; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The Denver image and benefits table are taken from the fact sheet's PDF. Benefit figures derive from Dewberry (2012).