Pushing Lidar to the Limits: High-resolution Bathymetric Lidar from Slow-flying Aircraft

Airborne bathymetric Lidar is an ideal tool to study underwater features in the usually rather clear waters along the coast of Australia. Due to the remoteness of many of the continent’s coastlines, this is often the only economically viable option for large-scale bathymetric mapping at high resolution. A new toolkit consisting of two airborne Lidar systems flown on a small and slow-flying research motorglider was trialled in NW Western Australia. The same technology will be used over the next three years in the context of a comprehensive study of submerged archaeological landscapes of the so-called ’Sea Country’, more than 1,000km along the NW Western Australian coast.