Assessing the Error Budget for Permanent Laser Scanning in Coastal Areas

An increased preference for building with nature solutions to mitigate possible negative effects of predicted climate change urges to acquire additional knowledge on coastal variability and resilience. Permanent laser scanning is a new and promising tool to observe and analyse natural variations at short (i.e. hourly) timescales for extended periods of time (i.e. years). In order to establish an error estimate over both space and time, a six months period of daily laser scans obtained at Kijkduin was analysed. The scans were obtained from a permanent laser scan setup on top of a hotel. We provide an overview of possible spatiotemporal error sources and of errors associated with a permanent laser setups for this particular example data set. In addition, some quantitative insights in the data quality are derived by assessing the variability of several parameters in space and time. Our analysis shows, that we can establish possible errors due to deformations in the laser scanner set up as well as small changes in range to reference objects at larger distances. Analysis of ranges within the point cloud shows that the range changes over time are in the order of centimetres indicating minimal deformation of the point clouds over time.