Abstract
The spaceborne mission TanDEM-X successfully acquired and processed a global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) from interferometric bistatic SAR data at X band. The product has been delivered in 2016 and is characterized by an unprecedented vertical accuracy. It is provided at 12 m, 30 m, and 90 m sampling and can be accessed by the scientific community via a standard announcement of opportunity process and the submission of a scientific proposal. The 90 m version is freely available for scientific purposes. The DEM is unedited, which means that it is the pure result of the interferometric SAR processing and subsequent mosaicking. Residual gaps, resulting, e.g., from unprocessable data, are still present and water surfaces appear noisy. This paper reports on the algorithms developed at DLR’s Microwaves and Radar Institute for a fully automatic editing of the global TanDEM-X DEM comprising gap filling and water editing. The result is a new global gap-free DEM product at 30 m sampling, which can be used for a large variety of scientific applications. It also serves as a reference for processing the upcoming TanDEM-X Change DEM layer.
Highlights
Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are of fundamental importance for a large variety of scientific and commercial applications
The original Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data have been reprocessed and mosaicked to the NASADEM product [7], which has been officially released in February 2020
We developed an independent global water-body layer (WBL) from the same input data set of nominal TanDEM-X acquisitions, starting from the work introduced in [15], and utilizing a multi-looked quicklook version of the original full-resolution images, in order to speed up the processing time
Summary
Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are of fundamental importance for a large variety of scientific and commercial applications. Plenty of local DEM products are available at various spatial resolutions and vertical accuracy levels. They can be generated using different sensors, such as, e.g., airborne laser scanners (LiDAR) or optical stereographic imaging platforms. In 2003, the first nearly global DEM derived from SRTM data was published It is characterized by a posting of 90 m and linear relative vertical accuracy of 10 meters (LE90). The first version was released in 2009 and the third and latest one in 2019 [5] Another global elevation model with better accuracy is the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) DEM, derived from the Prism sensor data between 2016 and 2019 [6]. The result shows a significant improvement in terms of quality and coverage with respect to the previous SRTM DEM versions [8]
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