Mapping project nearly complete

Thanks to the latest in landscape mapping technologies, water management officials will soon know all about the lay of the land in Florida’s Panhandle.
Data from LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, has already been collected and analyzed for Jackson and most other Panhandle counties.
The LiDAR data reveal that elevations run from sea level to 330 feet above seal level in some portions of Jackson County.
Liberty County and a small portion of Calhoun are last on the list. Planes will go up soon to collect data from those areas.
John Crowe, an associate hydrologist with the Northwest Florida Water Management District, explained how the process works.
“Planes fly over and shoot laser pulses down, which reflect back to the plane,” he said. “It paints the ground with pulses, essentially. The speed with which the image returns, calculated along with the distance from the plane, gives analysts the lay of the land.”
The crew takes the data and filters out the trees, vegetation and buildings to get basically a bare-ground look at the landscape. Knowing these things allows water district employees to lay out area-specific computer models that can help them predict flood and discharge levels, water flow during heavy rains, and gather other information.
The information is available to the general public, as well. For the water management district, the LiDAR data has a number of uses.
“Accurate topographic and elevation data are the starting points for nearly all water resource projects,” said District Executive Director Douglas Barr in a press release about the project. “Completing northwest Florida’s elevation detail will improve floodplain mapping, flood control planning and help protect lives and property.”
Ron Bartel, director of the district’s Resource Management Division, said in the press release that the project was pursued because “we recognized that it would serve many water resource purposes, and have used it daily for too many purposes to count. Completing full coverage across the district will be quite an achievement.”
Bartel said the data will be useful for flood hazard mapping, wetland mitigation projects, stormwater planning, developing hydrologic and hydraulic models, designing stormwater facilities, assessing watersheds and water supplies and other environmental planning and analysis projects.
The mapping is expected to be complete in a few weeks and was funded through a $225,000 grant from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Crowe said the Liberty-Calhoun mapping target area “includes a large portion of national forest and a more populated area in the lower Telogia Creek watershed. We had already obtained detailed elevation data for the Bristol area and thin strips along the Appalachicola and Ochlockonee rivers, but a 590-square-mile section was blank on the northwest Florida elevation map.”