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METI and NASA Release ASTER Global DEM Version 1

posted by Satri on Monday June 29, @02:09PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the whole-world-in-3D-at-high-rez-now dept.
DEM NASA Data Sharing
This is potentially major news for many geospatial experts. The METI and NASA released today version 1 of the ASTER Global DEM (GDEM). From the 2-pages announcement: "Consequently, the ASTER GDEM is available at no charge to users worldwide via electronic download from the Earth Remote Sensing Data Analysis Center (ERSDAC) of Japan and from NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC). [...] The ASTER GDEM covers land surfaces between 83°N and 83°S and is composed of 22,600 1°-by-1° tiles. Tiles that contain at least 0.01% land area are included. The ASTER GDEM is in GeoTIF format with geographic lat/long coordinates and a 1 arc-second (30 m) grid of elevation postings. The GDEM is referenced to the WGS84/EGM96 geoid. The GDEM’s pre-production accuracy estimates were 20 meters at 95% confidence for vertical data, and 30 meters at 95% confidence for horizontal data." The spatial extent covered and the spatial resolution are both higher than the also freely available CGIAR-CSI SRTM-DEM Version 4 which is still very pertinent since the ASTER GDEM announcement say "METI and NASA acknowledge that ASTER GDEM Version-1 should serve as an “experimental” or “research grade” product".

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