Isabel Flooding 

http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdemoutput.htm has a depiction of water level rise due to a hurricane at Annapolis.

Data sets.  You must do an update of your computer, and it might take a few minutes to download the large data sets.  The data will be in c:\mapdata\annapolis_high_res

• LIDAR elevations of the area around the Naval Academy.  Use "dem_1m_a1_annapolis.tif" for the DEM.  There is metadata in the "Extracted directory" in a series of XML files.  In particular you should find out when the mission was flown, and what vertical datum was used.
• Quick Bird commercial satellite image, at 0.6 m resolution in panchromatic and 2 m resolution in color.
• Bench marks from  the National Geodetic Service (NGS) at http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/datasheet.prl .  If you download these as a shape file, MICRODEM can display them on the LIDAR DEM or the satellite image. 
• Tides data from http://co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/data_res.html for historical data.  In addition to the tidal data, you must find the local tide datum and its relation to other vertical datums.

Your task:

• Verify the vertical registration of the LIDAR DEM.  Compare the elevations of at least 6 bench marks from the NGS with the elevation of the DEM at that point.  Defend your choice of bench marks, that the DEM point should be the same as the bench mark and will not be obscured by vegetation.
• Verify the tidal water heights during the time period that the LIDAR DEM was collected with what the LIDAR DEM shows.  Insure that you account for the datums used in each data set.
• Create an animation showing the rise of water level during hurricane Isabel.  Label the frames by time. You can use either the satellite image or the LIDAR DEM as the base map, but the LIDAR DEM is required for the program to compute flooding.  For time reasons, do this for a small subset of the DEM.  You must subset the DEM, and then save it. Insure that you have the vertical datums addressed.