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Topographical Map of Earth Mission Completed
dolphin558 writes "The mission to provide a topographical layout of a large swath of the planet Earth was completed after a four year partnership between NASA and NGA. The data was derived from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission launched February of 2000. The map extends from 60 degrees north of the Equator to 56 degrees south with a resolution level (for publicly available data) of 295 feet. The data can be used to set warning guidelines for low lying areas, regulate land use and further refine radar topography for extra-terrestrial applications as in the case of Venus."
The data is available here: http://srtm.usgs.gov/
And a great topological map of New Zealand. You can clearly see the different forces affecting the land here. The upwelling of volcanic activity in the north, and the collision of plates pushing up the Southern Alps in the south Island. And if you look very very close in the middle of the North Island, you can see Hobbiton.
...and preventing this
http://seamless.usgs.gov/ has the global data for free.
Years ago (early 1990's) I used to use radar elevation data to do 'theoretical' plots of radar coverage (that sounds confusing, but it is correct) in mountainous areas across various parts of asia - For visualisation I used ARC/View running on some old unix machine, but then found that an American program.... * cough * oil * cough * stock * had better presentation methods. The latter program I loved, but development was dropped for some unknown reason.
All this stuff can be found on the internet. It is neither new, nor difficult. Anyone can do it, even way back then, though the cost to 'purchase' the data was not cheap.
Mission Complete? Now how many more people have to die before the mapping is really done? I mean Iraq was complete a year and half ago. Just trying to find out how complete Mission Complete really means.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2005 -004
Wouldn't the tsunami have rendered large portions of this obsolete?
so where can i get a nice 24-bit JPG? :)
Enjoy an e-piphany
We have 5-meter data of Mars available for download from the Mars Global Survey...
Ah, well, if you want it done right -
Does anybody know of an OSS package that will let me take a whole bunch of waypoints from a WAAS GPS and build a topo map from it?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If I'm looking at the right data -- a big if -- it looks like the dataset includes some underwater topography, at least to a certain depth. Or is it just that the radar reflects differently from the water, giving the illusion of depth?
p hp, and zoomed in on the local fishing hole (Cedar Creek Lake, near Gun Barrel City, Texas). After picking the appropriate layers (Elevation/SRTM 30m Shaded Relief, turn off the bogus GTOPO60 layer), I could see a pebbly texture where the lake was. The texture looked more realistic on the mud flats on the north end of the lake. Turn on Hydrography/Streams, and you can see where the creek used to be (more or less). Turn on Hydrography/Waterbodies, and the lake is filled in (good for getting your bearings).
I went to http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.
Interestingly, though, there are some dropouts visible in the elevation data under the lake. They don't seem related to depth. I wonder if a party barge on water causes a strange echo?
Works on coastal areas, too. However, since the pebbly texture looks the same for the whole area of Matagorda Beach that I looked at, I suspect I'm not seeing anything but a false echo a few feet below the surface.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
so who has access to the non-publicly available data? Is it only the countries involved, or is it shared with other countries?
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