Pelydryn Successfully Completes Survey of Maltese Islands

A Pelydryn survey team has returned from successful deployment of the HawkEye IIb in Malta assisting TerraImaging in the production of the first fully integrated Topograhic LiDAR, Bathymetric LiDAR, side-sonar and Multibeam Echosounder datasets of a nation’s entire Economic Exclusion Zone.

Pelydryn’s part in the project, which is being carried out by leading geospatial data company, TerraImaging is to provide both terrestrial LiDAR in the coastal strip and high resolution bathymetric LiDAR within one nautical mile of the coastline of Malta.

The survey will contribute to a baseline survey of the Maltese Islands and will complement Multibeam and sidesonar data and terrestrial LiDAR and oblique imagery to produce an integrated 3D perspective of the Maltese Islands. This is part of a project to develop a national environmental monitoring infrastructure and capacity, co- financed by the European Regional Development Fund’ for the Maltese Environment and Planning Authority which provides 85% of the project’s funding and the Government of Malta, which finances the rest under Operational Programme 1 – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013 – Investing in Competitiveness for a Better Quality of Life.

Dr. Andrea Hoffmann, project leader for all Maltese activities, commented:

“We are very proud to realize this innovative future-proof project. As a result there will be a unique homogeneous data set of Malta from the deep bottom of the ocean to the church spires – covering all land area, the coastal zone and the sea bottom of the whole Archipelago”.

On deployment to Malta, the LiDAR flight operations ran successfully only disrupted occasionally by the strong winds and low cloud. Operations were under the direction of Andy Waddington, Head of Operations and, as one of Pelydryn’s Cat A surveyors, he is specialist in conducting hydrographic surveys for Charting Purposes.

“This was a fascinating project in some really stunning areas of coast, said Andy – as a standard, we monitor for data quality throughout the project and process the data on site to ensure our data meet our clients required specifications. Initial reviews of the data are good and by adopting a low altitude flight strategy, the HE2 has achieved the specification required and a data density which meets the 2m x 2m sounding post spacing required”, he added.

Pelydryn’s team of processors have now begun the task of the final data processing to produce full density cleaned ASCII X, Y, Z data in preparation for integration with the Terrestrial LiDAR and the Multibeam datasets.

[mappress]
Subsea World News Staff , July 23, 2012;  Image: Pelydryn