Description
Joining sonar (bathymetric data) and lidar data (land data) in one single high precision digital terrain model (DTM) of land and sea is relatively new procedure in Slovenia as well as in the world, especially due to the fact that precise lidar and sonar data are widely available through last decade. Its main advantage is the possibility of treating coastal zones as one entity in comparison with separate treatment of land and sea zones. The joined single DTM is very useful especially for terrain analysis, geological and morphological analysis, coast line analysis, determination of characteristics of land/sea interface etc.
Joining these two data sets is problematic from various points of view: unification of coordinate systems of both data types, determination of common height reference system, interpolation of the missing data for shallow sea area, determination of coast line, as well as processing and storage complexity of large data sets interpolation. The article describes the first bigger attempt of joining sonar and lidar data in Slovenia, including accompanying problems, various interpolation methods, their pros and cons for this kind of use, the selection of the most appropriate interpolation methods and its requirements. Firstly the joining was done in 2009 and covered approximately 1 km wide coastal zone of Slovenian coast.
Key words: Geography, digital terrain model (DTM), lidar, sonar, coastal zone, interpolation.
Primary author
Dr
Nataša Kolega
(University of Primorska)
