2018 USGS Lidar: Southern California Wildfires Point Cloud files with Vertical Datum North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88) using GEOID18

Below are links to the files that make up the 2018 USGS Lidar: Southern California Wildfires dataset.

Vertical datumNorth American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88) using GEOID18 in meters
Horizontal projection/datumNAD83(NSRS2007) / UTM zone 10N

Informational files are listed first (such as geospatial indices, metadata, and so on), followed by the files. To download in bulk, it is suggested you use a download manager such as wget, uget, or filezilla for example. The geospatial index file in shapefile format also has a URL attribute that some GIS programs can use to download files. You can also subset the data, make derived products, and change projection, datum, etc., using the Digital Coast Data Access Viewer (add to cart, the link to bulk download will take you here).

The files are in LAZ format, a lossless compressed version of the ASPRS LAS format. The compression and decompression can be done with the free and open source 'laszip' program available at https://rapidlasso.de/laszip/ (source at https://github.com/LASzip/LASzip). This is not the same as the more general zip format. You may also want to try the uGet program using the list of URLs in file urllist_ca2018_wildfires_m9003.txt. Several posts on the GeoZone blog provide help with downloading, including:

Example to download entire data set using wget (note: sufficiently new and trusted pre-compiled Windows versions can be hard to find):
wget -np -r -nH -L --cut-dirs=2 https://noaa-nos-coastal-lidar-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/laz/geoid18/9003/index.html/
This will give you the directory structure starting with geoid18. Modify the --cut-dirs=2 argument to modify the start directory (e.g. --cut-dirs=4 will start at $missionid). Wget is a command-line program and the output will be to the directory you run it in. More options and information can be found at https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html. The other options in the example mean:


If you have problems with wget that look like an authorization or certificate issue, you may need to add the option "--no-check-certificate". Windows users may want to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux to get a current wget.

The total size to download all the files is 1.1T. There are 24518 LAZ files and the summary class table is:

Class NumberClass NamePoints
1Unclassified121613091079
2Ground76667318358
7Low Point (noise)34288315
9Water723637753
17Bridge Deck11497686
18High Noise1930791
20Ignored Ground (near breakline)2619794

Cloud Access

This data is in an AWS S3 bucket at s3://noaa-nos-coastal-lidar-pds/laz/geoid18/9003.

Meta Information

Tile Index: tileindex_ca2018_wildfires_m9003.zip (Shapefile)
Tile Index: tileindex_ca2018_wildfires_m9003.gpkg (Geopackage)
Metadata: metadata_ca2018_wildfires.xml
Metadata: metadata_ca2018_wildfiresforHumans.html
XYZ range table: minmax_ca2018_wildfires_m9003.csv
URL List: urllist_ca2018_wildfires_m9003.txt

Supplemental Info

Files

CA_SoCal_Wildfires_2018_D18_Lidar_Project_Report.pdf
SoCal_Wildfires_Survey_Report.pdf
ca2018_socal_wildfires_m9003.kmz

Files

breaklines.gpkg
CA_SoCal_Wildfires_2018_D18_Breakline_Metadata_QL2.xml
breaklines.gdb.zip

Spatial Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC)

collection.json (See collection in STAC Browser)
noaa_copc_item_collection_m9003.json

Point Cloud Directories

B1
B2
B3
B4
Tl

This page is owned by the NOAA Office for Coastal Management and was created by an automated script on 2025-05-23 23:23:38.412545.
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