Soil roughness can play an important role in many soil surface boundary processes such as soil erosion, water infiltration, runoff, and depressional storage, the energy balance and gas exchange. Many current methods of measuring soil micro-topography including the drop-pin micro-relief meters have poor spatial resolution and accuracy. The use of a laser profiling system (LPS) is a relatively new non-contact technique that can quickly provide accurate and high resolution soil profiles. A field experiment was conducted to measure the change in soil roughness following simulated tillage using the LPS. The simulated tillage was performed on bare soil with three levels of tillage intensity, which consisted of a no-till control, low and high disturbance which were manually tilled to a depth of 7cm and 20cm respectively. Six soil profiles were measured on each treatment plot. The measured soil profiles were characterized using a univariate procedure. This method of analysis showed that as the tillage intensity increases there is a change in the standard deviation and range of soil heights with more points being in the extreme highs and lows. The univariate procedure, however, is very limiting in describing the nature of the soil roughness as there is no reference to the spatial distribution of these soil heights. A geostatistical approach such as the mean absolute-elevation-difference procedure will take into account the spatial distribution of soil heights. The mean absolute-elevation-difference procedure was applied to the same data set to characterize the soil profiles. This method of analysis demonstrated that the limiting elevation difference values increased as the intensity of tillage increased. This study demonstrates that the LPS can be a useful tool to use in measuring the changes in soil micro-topography following tillage.