Operational DEM Production from Airborne Interferometry and from RADARSAT Stereo Technologies

In this paper we report upon the advances achieved over the past year in the creation of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) on an operational, commercial basis, using data from two very different radar platforms. STAR3i is an airborne interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), capable of achieving DEMs at a level of detail and accuracy suitable for map scales as large as 1:10,000. A less detailed, but correspondingly less expensive product is achieved using TOPOSARTM technology to create DEMs from RADARSAT stereo image pairs.