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Ideas For Exploiting NASA's SRTM Data
MaxTardiveau writes with an excerpt from an article where the pictures are worth clicking through for: "Ten years ago, in February 2000, NASA mapped the entire world in eleven days. It's true: the mission was called the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), and over the course of eleven days, it used a big radar attached to the space shuttle to get elevation data from the vast majority of solid Earth; practically all land between 60 degrees North and 56 degrees South was included, with a resolution of 30 meters (90 feet). Over 9 terabytes of data were captured. It then took two years to process that data and make it usable (and it is still being refined to this day). This data is freely available to anyone, and the number of possible applications is almost infinite. It's been used in GIS, cartography, environmental planning, weather modeling (weather patterns are enormously influenced by the topography), flight simulators, Google Earth, and the list goes on. In this short article, I would like to give you a quick tour of the kinds of things this data can reveal. My hope is to get you thinking about what else could be done with this incredible resource."
I live at 60 deg North, you insensitive clod! (Ok, right now it is 59 deg 51' 7"...) I don't want to learn that I'll fall off a cliff if I take a step in the wrong direction...
The biggest resolution of this data is on US, so instead Osama might be able to find you.
As much as it would be useful to scan all the sea for height data I suspect that the vast majority of the sea is at sea level.
How much is "almost infinite"?
Which is why, unfortunately, (most) everyone uses ESRI products.
They may not be pretty, but at least you can go to a conference, because misery loves company.
That's not a gravity anomaly. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
Buy It Now price $20 - Five (5) Digit slashdot ID, low 30,000s. Original owner awoke Old One who thereupon dined on his head.
Finally, we might actually be able to find Osama Bin Laden.
Oh, please. With a resolution of 30 meters, the only person we're gonna find is yo mama!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)