LIDAR Point Cloud

Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) is an airborne mapping technique, which uses a laser to measure the height of the terrain and surface objects on the ground such as trees and buildings. Our LIDAR point cloud product is a collection of hundreds of millions, or sometimes billions of highly accurate 3-dimensional x,y,z points and component attributes. Our gridded raster products such as our digital surface and terrain models are derived from this point cloud. The component attributes a point cloud contains can provide valuable additional information to supplement elevation and can enable the user to make bespoke raster products such as canopy height models or intensity rasters.

Supplied as individual LAZ files labeled by Ordinance Survey grid reference the point cloud is available for surveys going back to 2006. Historic data are available for some areas where we have carried out repeat surveys, such as in the coastal zone for monitoring change. Although the DSM and DTM products are derived from the point cloud data there may not necessarily be a matching point cloud for each surface model due to historic data archiving processes. All LIDAR data has a vertical accuracy of +/-15cm RMSE.

Data is available in 5km download zip files for each year of survey. Within each downloaded zip file are LAZ files aligned to the Ordinance Survey grid. The size of each tile is dependent upon the spatial resolution of the data. Coverage metadata files showing data extent are also available. The coverage files contain metadata for each tile including the start and end date flown of a survey, and what additional component information the point cloud contains.

To find out more about LIDAR and the various surface models we produce please read our story map

This metadata record is for Approval for Access product AfA457. Attribution statement: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2019. All rights reserved. Attribution statement: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2019. All rights reserved.