Accuracy assessment of the SRTM 90m DTM over Greece and its implications to geoid modelling

Abstract

With the realization of the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) and the distribution of the 3 arcsec (90 m) data over Europe, a high-resolution digital terrain model (DTM) became available for Greece. Until today, high-resolution DTMs for Greece were generated by the Hellenic Military Geographic Service (HMGS) only and present variable resolutions with the finest one being set to 100 m. These DTMs were usually determined by digitizing topographic maps and are thus of variable and sometimes unknown accuracy. When a high-resolution, e.g., 0.5 - 1 arcmin geoid is needed, it is absolutely necessary to employ a very high resolution DTM to compute the terrain effects to gravity and the indirect effect to the geoid. If this information is not available and a coarser DTM is used, then the topographic effects computed are aliased, due to the insufficient resolution of the topographic data used. The scope of this work is twofold. First, a validation and accuracy assessment of the SRTM 90 m DTM over Greece is performed through comparisons with existing global models, like GLOBE and GTOPO30, as well as with the Greek 450 m DTMs delivered by HMGS. Whenever a misrepresentation of the topography is identified in the SRTM data, it is “corrected” using the local 100 m DTM. This processes resulted in an improved SRTM DTM called SRTMG, which was then used to determine terrain and RTM effects to gravity field quantities. Then, all available DTMs were used to compute terrain effects on both gravity anomalies and geoid heights at variable spatial resolutions. From the results acquired, the performance of the SRTMG model with respect to geoid modeling was assessed and conclusions on the effect of the DTM resolution were drawn.