30m global terrain (DEM) data available free

NASA has combined Terra satellite images to create a 30m resolution terrain dataset that covers the whole world. It's available online for free, although the website is now understandably swamped (so don't click the link).

We used 30m data for the US to compute beam blockage characteristics of different radars, but when I was in India on a US-AID project, the best terrain data of India they could easily obtain was a 1-km resolution data set from the USGS [I'm sure some mapping agency in India would have had higher resolution data, but it would have been a nightmare trying to get them to fork over the data]. So, a freely available global 30m data set is great.

The image in this post is from the Himalayan region of Bhutan. More information at The New Scientist.

1 comment:

  1. Your blog is quite informative and has enough resources about digital elevation model data. Keep on on posting useful things on DEM generation. Waiting for your next post.

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