Errors in laser based range measurements can be divided into two categories: intrinsic sensor errors (range drift with temperature, systematic and random errors), and errors due to the interaction of the laser beam with the environment. The former have traditionally received attention and can be modeled. The latter in contrast have long been observed but not well characterized. We propose to do so in this paper. In addition, we present a sensor independent method to remove such artifacts. The objective is to improve the overall quality of 3-D scene reconstruction to perform terrain classification of scenes with vegetation.