Digital Elevation Model - Production

Production

Mappers may prepare digital elevation models in a number of ways, but they frequently use remote sensing rather than direct survey data. One powerful technique for generating digital elevation models is interferometric synthetic aperture radar: two passes of a radar satellite (such as RADARSAT-1 or TerraSAR-X or Cosmo SkyMed), or a single pass if the satellite is equipped with two antennas (like the SRTM instrumentation), suffice to generate a digital elevation map tens of kilometers on a side with a resolution of around ten meters. Alternatively, other kinds of stereoscopic pairs can be employed using the digital image correlation method, where two optical images acquired with different angles taken from the same pass of an airplane or an Earth Observation Satellite (such as the HRS instrument of SPOT5 or the VNIR band of ASTER).

In 1986, the SPOT 1 satellite provided the first usable elevation data for a sizeable portion of the planet's landmass, using two-passes stereoscopic correlation. Later, further data were provided by the European Remote-Sensing Satellite (ERS) using the same method, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission using single-pass SAR and the ASTER instrumentation on the Terra satellite using double-pass stereo pairs.

The HRS instrument on SPOT 5 has acquired over 100 million square kilometers of stereo pairs.

Older methods of generating DEMs often involve interpolating digital contour maps that may have been produced by direct survey of the land surface, this method is still used in mountain areas, where interferometry is not always satisfactory. Note that the contour line data or any other sampled elevation datasets (by GPS or ground survey) are not DEMs, but may be considered digital terrain models. A DEM implies that elevation is available continuously at each location in the study area.

The quality of a DEM is a measure of how accurate elevation is at each pixel (absolute accuracy) and how accurately is the morphology presented (relative accuracy). Several factors play an important role for quality of DEM-derived products:

• terrain roughness;
• sampling density (elevation data collection method);
• grid resolution or pixel size;
• interpolation algorithm;
• vertical resolution;
• terrain analysis algorithm;
• Reference3D products include quality masks that give information on: the coastline, lake, snow, clouds, correlation etc....