The LIDAR point cloud is an archive of hundreds of millions, or sometimes billions of highly accurate 3-dimensional x,y,z points and component attributes produced by the Environment Agency.
The environment agecy site specific LIDAR DSM and DTM Time Stamped Tiles gridded raster products are derived from the point cloud. The component attributes a point cloud contains can provide valuable additional information to supplement elevation and can enable the user to make bespoke raster products such as canopy height models or intensity rasters.
Site specific LIDAR surveys have been carried out across England since 1998, with certain areas, such as the coastal zone, being surveyed multiple times. The point cloud is available for surveys going back to 2006. Although the DSM and DTM Tile Stamped Tiles products are derived from the point cloud data there may not necessarily be a matching point cloud for each surface model due to historic data archiving processes.
During processing the point cloud classifies the laser returns in the 'ground' and 'surface objects'. Further manual editing undertkaen on the derived digital terrain model (DTM) means the classifed ground points in the point cloud data will not match the final derived DTM.
Data is available in 5km download zip files for each year of survey. Within each downloaded zip file are LAZ files aligned to the Ordinance Survey grid. The size of each tile is dependent upon the spatial resolution of the data.
Please refere to the coverage metadata files for the start and end date flown of a survey as well as additional component information the point cloud contains such as the average point density. Attribution statement: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2019. All rights reserved.