On 22 Feburary 2022 three groups of students went to the beach in Noordwijk to collect data for the course 3D-surveying of Civil and Offshore Infrastructure at TU Delft by R. Lindenbergh. The students study how to extract terrain at the beach and how sand-shapes appear from aeolian transport. Another group compares photogrammetry data and laser scanning data of the beach and dunes.

Lot’s of ‘flying sand’ called aeolian sand transport could be observed and will be studied with the help of the collected data.

On 31st January 2022 the laser scanner is scanning under harsh weather conditions. Wind speeds above 12 m/s are reported and heavy rains hit the coasts. In the above point cloud high waves can be seen covering a large part of the usually dry sandy beach.

On 1st October 2021 we went with two students involved in the CoastScan project to perform our monthly scan from the beach. The dune foot is not captured by the permanent laser scanner in Noordwijk, so we regularly go to the beach to scan the dunes from the other side. K. Echeverry Caro works on filling these gaps in the data and quantifying the differences that they cause for her Bachelor thesis.

Part of the observed area in Noordwijk contains a helicopter platform in the dunes. Our research into data quality is making use of this platform as a reference surface (publication). During our research we found two helicopters that landed on the platform at two different occasions in September 2019 and in August 2020. Above the point clouds of the landed helicopters are shown colored according to elevation (left) and intensity (right).

For the course 3D surveying of civil and offshore infrastructure at TU Delft a group of students has worked on counting the people that are walking on the beach using our CoastScan data from Noordwijk. In their final report they present their method that is able to detect up to 90% of the people that are walking on the beach in an area of about 400 m length in front of the laser scanner.