Remote Sensing-Digital Elevation Model

MODULE 7: DIGITAL ELEVATION MODEL

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are the digital representation of the land surface. DEMs
can be used to extract various primary and secondary terrain attributes that have vast
applications in the hydrologic studies. With the help of satellite remote sensing, today DEMs
are available covering almost the entire land areas, with reasonable accuracy, from many
sources. With the near-global coverage and reasonably good spatial resolution, digital
elevation data derived from the satellite remote sensing have now been widely used in the
hydrologic modeling and analysis. The selection of a DEM for a study depends on the DEM
type, its resolution and the accuracy required.

This module gives a description of different types of DEMs and their application in
hydrologic studies. The module starts with a description of different types of DEM data
structures and sources of digital elevation data. The second lecture covers the basic principles
of radar interferometry used for deriving digital terrain data from stereo pairs of radar images.
Details of the popular Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) targeted at generating
high quality, near global digital topographic data are mentioned in the third lecture. The
fourth and the fifth lectures cover the methodologies used for extracting various topographic
and hydrologic attributes from the DEM. A few case studies are also included in the last
lecture.

At the end of the module the reader will get an idea about

1. Different types of the digital elevation data

2. Various sources of digital elevation data

3. Principles used in the radar interferometry to extract the elevation information

4. Details of the SRTM and the Global Digital Elevation Model from SRTM

5. How to extract primary topographic attributes from the raster DEM

6. How to delineate the stream network and catchment area using the DEM

D Nagesh Kumar, IISc, Bangalore M7L0