WorldDEM - New Standard for Global Elevation Information
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Riegler, G.; 2Hennig, S.
1AIRBUS DS Email: gertrud.riegler@astrium.eads.net
2AIRBUS DS Email: simon.hennig@astrium.eads.net
Abstract
The WorldDEM is a new standard in satellite based global high resolution elevation model. The two radar sensors TerraSAR-X and Tan-DEM-X acquired worldwide data from space absolutely reliably, as they operate independent of cloud coverage and lighting conditions. The con-certed acquisition guarantees a global homogenous DEM without heteroge-neities caused by differing measurement procedures or data collection campaigns staggered in time. With the successful launch of the German radar satellite TanDEM-X on June 21st, 2010, a new era of global digital elevation information provision has commenced. Together with TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X forms a high-precision radar interferometer acquiring the data basis for WorldDEM. The dataset is available in different product types: unedited and edited elevation models. The edited product contains the flattening of water bodies and the correction of artifacts introduced by the SAR effects like layover and shad-ow. For applications like defence and security, aviation and hydrological model-ling standardization of the specification is important in order to get reliable and comparable information on global scale. The validation approach for WorldDEM is a strict workflow which results in reliable figures for the ab-solute accuracies.
Keywords
WorldDEM; TanDEM-X Mission; Digital Elevation Model