Shuttle radar topography mission produces a wealth of data

Abstract

On February 22, 2000, the Space Shuttle Endeavour landed at Kennedy Space Center, completing the highly successful 11‐day flight of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Onboard were over 300 high‐density tapes containing data for the highest resolution digital topographic map of Earth ever made. SRTM is a cooperative project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. The mission was designed to use a single‐pass radar interferometer to produce a digital elevation model (DEM) of the Earth's land surface between about 60 north and 56 south latitude. When completed, the DEM will have 30‐m pixel spacing and about 15‐m vertical accuracy. Two ortho‐rectified image mosaics, one from the ascending passes with illumination from the southeast, and one from descending passes with illumination from the southwest, will also be produced (Figure 1).

Present state of global wetland extent and wetland methane modelling: methodology of a model inter-comparison project (WETCHIMP)

“…The lake/wetland portion of each grid cell was determined as the superset of the Sheng et al (2004) peatland map; wetlands, wet tundra, and croplands (so that nearby lakes could have a surrounding catchment) given by the Bartalev et al (2003) land cover classification; and lakes given by the Global Lake and Wetland Database (GLWD; Lehner and Döll, 2004). Bathymetries for the lake/wetlands were estimated by combining lake size distributions from the GLWD; average lake depths from literature for bog pools, Arctic thaw lakes, and other boreal lakes; and topography of surrounding wetlands from the ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) (Hayakawa et al, 2008) and STRM (Shuttle Topography Radar Mission; Digital Elevation Model ) (Farr and Kobrick, 2000) DEMs. When lake storage increased beyond the bounds of the "permanent" lake, it was allowed to flood the surrounding wetlands, with drainage rate controlled by a calibrated parameter.…”

Hydrologic Derivatives for Modeling and Analysis—A new global high-resolution database

“…The HydroSHEDS DEM was derived from the SRTM DEM (Farr and Kobrick, 2000) by using several ancillary layers to hydrologically condition the DEM (filling spurious sinks and enforcing drainage along previously mapped hydrographic networks). The HydroSHEDS DEM covers most land masses of the globe south of 60°N.…”

“…The HYDRO1k database was developed from the Global 30 ArcSecond Elevation (GTOPO30) DEM (Gesch and others, 1999), which has a 30-arc-second resolution (about 1 kilometer at the equator). With the completions of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DEM (Farr and Kobrick, 2000) and the Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010) dataset (Danielson and Gesch, 2011), production of a highresolution hydrologic derivative database for the entire globe became possible.…”

Compressing Web Geodata for Real-Time Environmental Applications

“…The DEM used in this work, provided by NASA, is the outcome of Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) [7]; data can be seen as a regular grid overlaid on the Earth surface, where each grid point reports the height of the terrain in that position. We consider two different versions of SRTM DEM: SRTM1 at 1 arcsec resolution (which corresponds to ≈ 30m in areas relatively far from the poles), and SRTM3 at 3 arcsec resolution (≈ 90m).…”