CARTOGRAPHY OF THE SOUTHERN ZONE OF CHILE USING RSTM
M.L. Advis, C. Andrade
Military Geographic
mladvis@igm.cl
The southern zone of the country has unique features making the creation of the topographic coverage especially difficult.
Given that a large part of the cartography of the Southern Zone of Chile has to be created from the beginning, which requires a lot of time using the traditional methods of aero-photogrammetric restitution, research was carried out to find a way to do this that would be faster yet maintain the technical characteristics of the existing cartography of the rest of the country.
The SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography
Mission) carried out on the space shuttle offered an alternative, so various
tests were carried out, specifically with SRTM 2 (
Once the greater part of the contours and of the other information, that is, the roads, spot heights, coast lines, and population centres was gathered, the rest was obtained by means of restitution with the existing photographic coverage. It was also necessary to generate the contours in those sectors where the SRTM provided no information. Once the contours from SRTM and from aerophotogrammetric restitution were combined, the result was excellent.
The most important gain from this
experience was that information from two different techniques could be combined
to complement each other and achieve a good final product, thus saving time and
man / hours at work. The information from SRTM2 that enabled the creation of
the contour lines at every
This has been an experience entirely valid for those countries which have not achieved a cartographic coverage of their territory.