EAARL: A LIDAR FOR MAPPING SHALLOW CORAL REEFSAND OTHER COASTAL ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

The EAARL (Experimental Advanced Airborne Research Lidar) is a new airborne lidar thatprovides unprecedented capabilities to survey coral reefs, nearshore benthic habitats, coastalvegetation, and sandy beaches. The EAARL sensor suite includes a raster?scanning?waterpenetrating full?waveform adaptive lidar, a down?looking color digital camera, a hyperspectralscanner1, and an array of precision kinematic GPS receivers which provide for sub?meter geo?referencing of each laser and hyper?spectral sample.EAARL has the unique real?time capability to detect, capture, and automatically adapt to eachlaser return backscatter over a large signal dynamic range and keyed to considerable variations invertical complexity of the surface target. These features enable automatic adaptive acquisition ofdramatically different surface types in a single EAARL overflight. This makes EAARL uniquelywell suited for mapping applications such as coral reefs, bright sandy beaches, coastal vegetation,and trees where extreme variations in the laser backscatter complexity and signal strength arecaused by different physical and optical characteristics.