GEOSPATIAL SURVEY OF HIGH PLAINS PLAYAS USING HIGH RESOLUTION TOPOGRAPHIC MODELS

The High Plains Playa basins found across wide areas of the western United States represent a class of water retaining, hydraulically closed, ovoid basins comparable to the Carolina bays of the Eastern US and Rainwater Basins of Nebraska. The playas are generally considered to have an eolian and karst geomorphology and are imbedded within members of the Blackwater Draw Formation, whose sediments lie above the calcified caprock of the High Plains aquifer. The genesis of both the Playas and the surficial sediments they are found within are the subject of ongoing research. The establishment of the playa-dotted landscape during the Quaternary may have transformed the climate of the region by buffering open water subaerially. Collectively, these hydraulically closed basins on the High Plains have been proposed as the primary source of recharge to the currently stressed regional aquifers. Playas are under constant stress from anthropological alterations, making their preservation and restoration an ecological and economic imperative. The advent of Light Detection and Ranging technology facilitates a new look at these landforms using High Resolution Topographic Models (HRTMs). A westward extension of a geospatial survey leveraging seamless HRTMs has encountered these gentle basins. Employing Google Earth as a freely available visualization platform, the facility discussed offers a unique perspective on their shapes, sizes, and spatial distribution. Access to the imagery is freely provided for non-profit use by accessing a cloud-based repository using a light-weight keyhole markup language file. The implementation leverages techniques to minimize download bandwidth based on the user’s viewport. Examples of the HRTMs visualization using a perceptive cyclic palette is provided, along with a discussion of the GIS workflow from source datasets to displayed imagery. Ongoing work include surveying each individual playa and documenting their metrics using the templating protocol of the existent Carolina Bay and Rainwater Basin geospatial survey.