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Ground-based lidar data of the southeast face of El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, California, May 4, 2022

Published by U.S. Geological Survey | Department of the Interior | Metadata Last Checked: January 27, 2026 | Last Modified: 2025-01-14T00:00:00Z
We collected two ground-based (terrestrial) lidar scans of the southeast face of El Capitan cliff, located in Yosemite National Park, California. El Capitan is one of several iconic granitic cliffs in Yosemite and rises approximately 1000 meters above the floor of Yosemite Valley. The scans were collected from the same location and from a single vantage point on the edge of El Capitan meadow, about 1 kilometer from the cliff base. The two scans were collected roughly three hours apart from one another to assess accuracy related to thermal changes to the rock cliff. Each lidar scan captures an identical section of the wall totaling approximately 1 square kilometer in vertical surface area. The resulting point clouds each consists of approximately 59 million points (approximate point density of 59 points/square meter).

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