Review of progress on VDatum, a vertical datum transformation tool

VDatum is a software tool developed by the National Ocean Service that allows users to transform geospatial data among a variety of geoidal, ellipsoidal, and tidal vertical data. This is important to coastal applications that rely on vertical accuracy in bathymetric, topographic, and coastline data sets. The VDatum software can be applied to a single point location or to a batch data file. Applying VDatum to an entire data set can be particularly useful when merging multiple data sources together, where they must first all be referenced to a common vertical datum. Emerging technologies, such as lidar and kinematic GPS data collection, can also benefit from VDatum in providing new approaches for efficiently processing shoreline and bathymetric data with accurate vertical referencing. Given the numerous applications that can benefit from having a vertical datum transformation tool, the goal is to develop a seamless nationwide VDatum utility that would facilitate more effective sharing of vertical data and also complement a vision of linking such data through national databases.