NCALM. PI: Brian Wernicke, Caltech and Bernard Guest, University of Calgary. The survey area consisted of three 500 meter wide corridors near the California-Nevada border and across the Pahrump Valley. The corridors total approximately 60 km long, 0.5 to 1 km wide and contained approximately 40 square km. Please note that the flight was conducted in an unconventional way as this was an add-on to other work and was done to quickly obtain data for the requested area. Rather than flying a regular, straight grid across the area, the airplane banked along the determined trajectory. This way of gathering data introduces noticeable error, especially on the fringes of the flight path, giving a "corduroy" appearance to the data. This is in addition to the background periodic fine scale elevation variation (normally 5 to 20cm) which is a property of the Optech LIDAR system, and within the machine's error limits. This effect is less noticeable in Corridor 1 as the plane was following a mostly straight trajectory. Our understanding is that if these preliminary data looked promising, a carefully planned survey would then be conducted if funding became available. Bare-earth extraction was not performed on this dataset due to the scarceness of vegetation in the interest area. Filtering the data with a conservative feature preserving algorithm (Hagerud) can remove some of the vegetation but with the expense of smoothing out some of the morphology in steep areas.

Publications associated with this dataset can be found at NCALM's Data Tracking Center