NOAA Introduction to Lidar: Free Online Course

September 1, 2016
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Updated February 9, 2026
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1 min read

NOAA logo featuring the text "NOAA" and a stylized wave design.
NOAA’s Office of Coastal Management Digital Coast is offering a free, online training course entitled, “Introduction to Lidar.” It’s an 80 minute tutorial including the following  topics:

  • Define lidar

  • Select types of elevation data for specific coastal applications

  • Describe how lidar data are collected

  • Identify the characteristics of lidar data

  • Distinguish between lidar data products

  • Recognize aspects of data quality that impact data usability

  • Locate lidar data sources and additional information resources


This self-paced, online training introduces several fundamental concepts of lidar and demonstrates how high-accuracy lidar-derived elevation data support natural resource and emergency management applications in the coastal zone. The material provides geospatial analysts with the information needed to understand the characteristics of lidar that have direct impacts on mapping and spatial analysis projects. A demonstration is included to show how lidar data can be downloaded from NOAA’s Digital Coast.

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Gene Roe - founder of Lidar News

SAM Managed geospatial services

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