do excess cross section points really provide a better hydraulic model? lets say for example, my LIDAR data inserts 5,000 points into the cross section, I’d filter out many so to arrive at about 50-100 … what would y’all do in this situation? Should that max = 500 coordinates be what I twiddle the 5,000 points down to?
Generally you only need enough points to adequately define the channel and manning roughness, this could be 4 points for a trap channel or 500 points for a complex channel. That being said, I usually filter the points to 500 as there is no harm in having more points.