UF, Berkeley receive $4 million grant to continue mapping with lasers

October 1, 2008

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The National Science Foundation recently awarded a five-year $4 million renewal grant to researchers at the University of Florida and the University of California at Berkeley for the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, known as NCALM.

The decision was good news for principal investigator Ramesh Shrestha and co-principal investigators Bill Carter and Clint Slatton, all professors in UF’s College of Engineering. UF will receive $3 million from the grant.

“At NCALM, we have worked to continually improve our ability to collect, process, and analyze LIDAR data that we provide to the earth science community,” Slatton said. “But NCALM also serves the national interest because our measurements of earthquake faults, levees, glaciers, and erosive beaches can help federal and state policy makers mitigate natural disasters.”

Using Light Detection And Ranging, known as LIDAR, the center’s researchers produce incredibly detailed three-dimensional images of terrain using laser pulses beamed earthward from an airplane. The technology has been applied both to environmental remote sensing and to military reconnaissance.

UF was the first university in the nation to purchase and operate a survey-grade airborne LIDAR system in 1998. Researchers mounted the system in a Cessna 337 at Gainesville’s airport. Pumping out 5,000 laser pulses a second, they mapped beaches, marshes, flood zones, sink holes, highways and forests in Florida and nearby states.

In 2003, UF and Berkeley started the laser mapping center with funding from the Instrumentation and Facilities Program in the Division of Earth Sciences at NSF. The center collected and processed LIDAR measurements for more than 50 NSF research projects scattered across the nation. In California, for example, NCALM researchers used LIDAR to create the highest-resolution 3-D image of the San Andreas Fault ever produced.

In 2007, UF purchased a new LIDAR unit that generates more than 160,000 laser pulses a second. With the new model, researchers can map areas covered with dense foliage and create high-resolution maps of the bare ground underneath, exposing details on the earth’s surface that might never have been studied otherwise.

In recent years, earth scientists from around the country have presented findings on processes, such as landslides, stream incision, erosion, and volcanism, at numerous workshops and international conferences that were made possible by LIDAR measurements from NCALM.

For more information, visit the NCALM Web site at http://www.ncalm.org.