Use of Airborne and Terrestrial Lidar to Detect Ground Displacement Hazards to Water Systems
Publication: Journal of Surveying Engineering
Volume 135, Issue 3
Abstract
We investigate the use of multiepoch airborne and terrestrial lidar to detect and measure ground displacements of sufficient magnitude to damage buried pipelines and other water system facilities that might result, for example, from earthquake or rainfall-induced landslides. Lidar scans are performed at three sites with coincident measurements by total station surveying. Relative horizontal accuracy is evaluated by measurements of lateral dimensions of well defined objects such as buildings and tanks; we find misfits ranging from approximately , which is consistent with previous work. The bias and dispersion of lidar elevation measurements, relative to total station surveying, is assessed at two sites: (1) a power plant site (PP2) with vegetated steeply sloping terrain; and (2) a relatively flat and unvegetated site before and after trenching operations were performed. At PP2, airborne lidar showed minimal elevation bias and a standard deviation of approximately , whereas terrestrial lidar did not produce useful results due to beam divergence issues and inadequate sampling of the study region. At the trench site, airborne lidar showed minimal elevation bias and reduced standard deviation relative to PP2 , whereas terrestrial lidar was nearly unbiased with very low dispersion . Pre- and posttrench bias-adjusted normalized residuals showed minimal to negligible correlation, but elevation change was affected by relative bias between epochs. The mean of elevation change bias essentially matches the difference in means of pre- and posttrench elevation bias, whereas elevation change standard deviation is sensitive to the dispersion of individual epoch elevations and their correlation coefficient. The observed lidar bias and standard deviations enable reliable detection of damaging ground displacements for some pipelines types (e.g., welded steel) but not all (e.g., concrete with unwelded, mortared joints).
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Acknowledgments
The work of writers J. P. S., R. E. K., T. S. H., and T. D. O. was supported by grants from the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, which in turn is supported by Master Agreement No. NSFEEC-970147 from the National Science Foundation. The City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power funded the surveying and airborne lidar work. This support is appreciated. The views and opinions expressed in this document represent those of the writers and do not reflect the policy of the federal government. Dr. Ronald Eguchi of Imagecat is thanked for facilitating contractual matters related to the work of J. P. S., T. S. H., and R. E. K. Carolin Ferwerda is thanked for her work on processing airborne lidar data. The writers also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Surveying Engineering
Volume 135 • Issue 3 • August 2009
Pages: 113 - 124
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Feb 1, 2008
Accepted: Feb 9, 2009
Published online: Jul 15, 2009
Published in print: Aug 2009
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