Within NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey, the Remote Sensing Division and the Coastal Mapping Program have pushed the limits of lidar technology for the past two decades. Using lidar data collected from NOAA aircraft and the VDatum software tool to transform between tidal and geodetic datums, NGS developed the procedures for extracting the National Shoreline for use on official US Nautical Charts. NGS has been a driver for advances in topobathy lidar to map the nearshore zone because of the dramatically increased efficiency of collecting accurate data for the nautical charts in shallow water. In addition to increasing efficiency, this use of lidar has also decreased the risks faced by crews of NOAA’s hydrographic survey vessels who have historically mapped our nation’s shallow water from small survey launches. Due to its broad spatial coverage and versatility in creating elevation models, NOAA’s lidar data has been a core element of the Integrated Ocean and Coastal Mapping program’s strategy to “Map Once, Use Many Times.” This strategy supports the joint NOAA and USGS 3D Nation vision of a United States enriched by an accurate, modern, continuous elevation surface from the peaks of our mountains to the depths of our waters. Beyond navigation safety and efficient maritime commerce, NOAA and partners are able to generate additional value from the data by also using it to improve inundation modeling, coastal restoration efforts, and resilience planning among many other important applications.