LiDAR data can be incredibly powerful to extract elevations of the ground and objects at city scales. At One Concern, we are using LiDAR data to extract ground and building elevations to improve the exposure information that goes into our natural disaster models, to eventually estimate impacts from floods and earthquakes.

With the 3DEP project expected to collect US-wide LiDAR data by 2023, availability of LiDAR data should become easier and a lot more widespread. However, since LiDAR is pointcloud data, it can contain billions of points per city, and it is not straightforward to read and process the data. Although other articles have already been written about how to process LiDAR data to extract building heights, some of the libraries have since been discontinued or superseded. With this article, I intend to provide a more up-to-date set of tools and processes to use LiDAR data to extract building elevations, using San Francisco as an example.

#data-science #data #lidar #resilience