In a lot of organizations, lidar data is part of a larger data management effort that includes other elevation data. Some projects require analysis of the lidar data in 3D point cloud format, but most lidar projects share a need for elevation surfaces such as a bare-earth digital terrain model (DTM) and a first-return digital surface model (DSM). A key requirement is fast access for visualization and analysis of elevation surfaces to support a variety of workflows.
Representations of the data, such as hillshade and slope, are often required, and the raster surfaces can be used for viewshed and volumetric analysis. The elevation data in an organization typically comes from many different projects, and in some cases, with the same area covered by multiple data collections. Raster generation from lidar is a primary aim of this workflow.
Another common requirement is making lidar point clouds available as a service, or allowing your users to download the lidar points for detailed analysis. As an alternative to your users downloading the point clouds, you can use geoprocessing tools that use the underlying 3D points in an analysis task to return the required results.
Depending on your organization and the needs of your users, you'll probably do some combination of the following:
- Manage your lidar collections using LAS datasets.
- Perform quality control checks to verify the lidar data.
- Determine the parameters to create raster files.
- Create derived raster elevation surfaces for visualization and analysis.
- Create mosaic datasets and provide the data as a raster service.
- Share the lidar points for visualization using a web browser.
- Enable download of the lidar point files.
- Build and share geoprocessing services for server-side analysis.
The recommended workflow for processing and managing lidar data in ArcGIS includes many steps in common with the recommended best practices for elevation data. As such, this documentation describes only the lidar-specific details as required; you should also refer to the elevation workflow.
You can also download the Elevation scripts and sample data to review along with this documentation, as it provides examples for working with the raster surfaces created in this workflow.