Upon completion of the SRTM project, assessing the accuracy of the SRTM elevation data and its correlation to conventional photogrammetric methods has been a focus for many research projects. To date, elevation models derived from OrbView-3 and IKONOS have not had a significant number of comparisons to SRTM data. This study attempts to quantify the relative differences between elevation data co...

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) produced near-global 1 and 3 DEMs. The cartographically-derived National Elevation Dataset (NED) provides a mechanism to assess SRTM quality. We compared 12 geomorphometric parameters from SRTM to NED for about 500,000 sample areas over the continental United States. For basic parameters like average elevation or relief, the two data sets correlate ve...

Elevation data based on NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) have been widely used to evaluate threats from global sea level rise, storm surge, and coastal floods. However, SRTM data are known to include large vertical errors in densely urban or densely vegetated areas. The errors may propagate to derived land and population exposure assessments. We compare assessments based on SRTM d...

[1] We assess the accuracy and resolution of topography data provided by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) through spectral comparisons with the National Elevation Dataset (NED) and a high-resolution laser data set of the 1999 Hector Mine earthquake rupture. We find that SRTM and the NED are coherent for wavelengths greater than 200 m, however the spatial resolution of the NED data is...

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) digital elevation model (DEM) is one of the most complete and frequently used global-scale DEM products in various applications. However, previous studies have shown that the SRTM DEM is systematically higher than the actual land surface in vegetated mountain areas. The objective of this study is to propose a procedure to calibrate the SRTM DEM over l...

The U.S National Elevation Dataset and the NLCD 2001 landcover data were used to test the correlation between SRTM elevation values and the height of evergreen forest vegetation in the Klamath Mountains of California.Vegetation height estimates (SRTM-NED) are valid only for the two out of eight (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW) geographic directions, due to NED and SRTM grid data misregistration. Pe...

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) was flown in February 2000 and collected the first ever high-resolution near-global digital elevation data. The final SRTM data have become widely available at 1 arc-second resolution for the United States and 3 arc-second resolution for other areas. This article reviews the background of the SRTM mission, the data quality characteristics of the SRTM ...