2012 upgrade:

90m-resolution, near-global SRTM elevation mosaic and shaded-relief base maps + global elevation mosaic resampled at 90m-resolution (higher latitudes filled by other elevation sources at closest resolutions) and shaded-relief base maps

More than 14000 SRTM 1 x 1 degree tiles (90m-resolution) are stitched together to make a seamless, near-global elevation mosaic, followed by elevation gaps filling and shaded-relief map production.

Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), flew on the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched on 11 February 2000, had successfully collected 3-D measurements of the ~80% Earth's surface. The mission was a cooperative project between NASA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, and the German and Italian space agencies, and was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, Washington, D.C.

USGS distributes the latest SRTM Version 2 (also known as the "finished" version) data set, which is the result of substantial editing effort by NGA. It features the following:

- Well-defined water bodies (e.g., lakes, reservoirs and major rivers) and coastlines;
- Absence of spikes and wells (single pixel errors); and
- A small percentage of elevation voids (gaps, holes or missing data) still present.

We advocate the importance and potential of this public-domain data set, and have undertaken significant post-processing to produce a seamless, highest-resolution, global elevation mosaic and a series of cartographically-designed, GIS-ready shaded relief base maps. This task is recently updated for 2012 release.

Here are a few important steps:

Step 1: Stitching 14,000+ separate SRTM tiles together to make a seamless near-global mosaic (data size: 432,000 X 139,200 pixels)

Step 2: Expanding to the worldwide coverage (data size: 432,000 X 216,000 pixels)

Elevations at higher latitudes are filled by other global elevation sources at closest resolutions possible. An overview is provided in the following figure, and other sources are the very recently released USGS's Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010). The low-resolution SRTM30 or GTOPO30 data is NOT used here.

Step 3: Filling gaps

A significant part of our post-processing is to fill some gaps in the original SRTM tiles. An illustration is shown below:

Step 4: Masking with land / ocean boundary

Since some parts of the world (e.g. low-lying coastal regions) are below the mean sea level from physical measurement, it is often ineffective to show those land areas when ocean waters are represented by the mean sea level of zero metres. We have applied a high-resolution mask to indicate land and ocean boundary, and this step is especially useful for making realistic shaded-relief base maps.

Step 5: Making shaded-relief base maps

A series of shaded-relief base maps are produced under various colour schemes and hillshading settings. Hillshading colour schemes are shown below: A1, A2, A3, ... Each base map is with the image size of 432,000 X 216,000 pixels. While the size of these maps is large, virtually all major GIS systems these days can display large-sized JPEG2000 imagery effortlessly.

Shaded-relief base maps vividly illustrate both hillshading effects and topographic heights in colour gradients. Efforts have been made to highlight and better visualise geological and geomorphologic features such as seismic faults and coastal fluvial plains.

Hillshading settings are as follows:

• Light source altitudes: 60 (by default) or 45 degrees
• Light source azimuth: 45 (by default), 0 or 315 degrees
• Elevation vertical exaggeration: 0.8 (by default), 1.4 or 2.8

A1
A2
A3
C1	... more to add

Spatial resolution comparison

Left 1km-resolution in previous global elevation mosaics, e.g., GTOPO30, SRTM30 Right 90m-resolution in the new near-global SRTM elevation mosaic and hillshading maps   100 times more detailed!

1. Data product summary

Coverage	Global (Longitude 180W-180E, Latitude 90N-90S), including SRTM data for Longitude 180W-180E, Latitude 60N-56S region
Projection	Latitude/longitude Geographic, WGS84
Resolution	90m
Image size	432,000 X 216,000 pixels for global raw data and shaded-relief base maps
Format	JPEG2000, GeoTIFF, ENVI's IMG or any other format major GIS software packages support
File size	Single file for global elevation data resampled at 90m-resolution - 173GB for the elevation raw data mosaic with gaps filled  - 5 to 50GB for each shaded-relief base map (under JPEG2000 compression)
Additional file	SRTM mosaic mask showing pixels with elevation voids (gaps) in the raw SRTM tiles
Media	External hard drives with USB 2.0 / 3.0 compliant interfaces

With the raw elevation data at hand, any users (even with little GIS background) can conveniently subset any small-sized region of interest and then perform dedicated 2D and 3D terrain modelling in GIS. For example, we use the low-cost GIS software Global Mapper to easily make numerous 3D renderings:

3D: Shaded relief Region: Mt. Fuji, Japan	3D: SRTM elevation	3D: Global elevation mosaic + Earth Land Surface 2000 (version 1) satellite imagery. Region: Mt. Rainier, Washington

Are you interested in above GIS-ready datasets? Please consider the following:

• While many business applications (e.g., real estate property searches) require very detailed images such as Street View and oblique aerial photos, for applications such as regional environmental studies and landscape simulations, medium-resolution data at 30m to 90m-resolution could be sufficient.
• Imagine you have infrastructure and platform to make another virtual world, but are seeking a low-cost solution for near-global imagery data ...
• Imagine you are interested in GIS desktop mapping and wish to own a copy of the imagery data locally and make underlying elevation and imagery layers fully dynamic and integrative.
• Are you thinking of boosting agency-wide mapping productivity using globally consistent data sets?
• Imagine you do not wish to have access to online imagery from virtual globes such as Google Maps or Microsoft Bing Maps, concern about licensing terms or unexpected network disconnections ...

 

2. Free download: 1km-resolution, global SRTM30_PLUS hillshading map

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Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at University of California, San Diego, has recently created a popular 1km-resolution global elevation and bathymetry data set called SRTM30_PLUS. The data can be downloaded from its website freely for non-commercial uses. Users should read SRTM30_PLUS COPYRIGHT and README files for more information. We at GeoSage have also implemented a terrain analysis and created hillshading maps in JPEG2000 format for the SRTM30_PLUS (SRTM30_PLUS data courtesy of Joseph Becker). Interested users can download a copy of SRTM30_PLUS hillshading map below freely for non-commercial applications, with due acknowledgement.
	SRTM30_PLUS hillshading map in Google Earth
	SRTM30_PLUS hillshading map A Readme file Download (image size: 43200 x 21600 pixels; file size: 47MB; format JPEG2000)
	SRTM30_PLUS hillshading map B Readme file Download (image size: 43200 x 21600 pixels; file size: 29.5MB; format JPEG2000) Small sizes: 4320 x 2160 pixels 8640 x 4320 pixels
Free, efficient tools for viewing large-sized JPEG2000 files: ER Viewer (Version 7.2) from ERDAS GeoViewer (Version 3.0) from LizardTech Nowadays almost all popular GIS and remote sensing software can display JPEG2000 files easily.