We evaluated six global digital elevation DEMs at 1-arc-sec resolution: CopDEM and AW3D30, which are digital surface models (DSMs), and EDTM, GEDTM, FABDEM, and FathomDEM, which are digital terrain models (DTMs). We compared them to reference DTMs cr...
We have carried out a characterization of users and uses of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), in order to be able to study an adaptation of the most appropriate DEM. In the previous literature, there have not been many similar studies of this subject....
Digital elevation models (DEMs) are the basic data of science and engineering technology research. SRTM and ASTER GDEM are currently widely used global DEMs, and TanDEM-X DEM, released in 2016, has attracted users’ attention due to its unprecedented...
Devastating floods are observed every year globally from upstream mountainous to coastal regions. Increasing flood frequency and impacts affect both major rivers and their tributaries. Nonetheless, at the small-scale, the lack of distributed topograp...
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry technique generates digital elevation models (DEMs) and is used by various agencies widely. The recently released TanDEM-X DEM by DLR at 90 m spatial resolution is available for free download to users. Th...
Comparing two digital elevation models (DEMs), S1 (reference) and S2 (product), in order to get the S2 quality, has usually been performed on sampled points. However, it seems more natural, as we propose, comparing both DEMs using 2.5D surfaces: appl...
Several global digital elevation models (DEMs) have been developed in the last two decades. The most recent addition to the family of global DEMs is the TanDEM-X DEM. The original version of the TanDEM-X DEM is, however, a nonedited product (i.e., it...
Land use and land cover (LULC) is a key variable of the Earth’s system and has become an important indicator to evaluate the impact of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems. With the increasing demand of mine resources, widespread opencast minin...
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) system on board the Terra (EOS AM-1) satellite has been a source of stereoscopic images covering the whole globe at 15-m resolution with consistent quality for over 16 years....
Fine-resolution LiDAR DEMs can represent surface features such as road and railway embankments with high fidelity. However, transportation embankments are problematic for several environmental modelling applications, and particularly hydrological mod...
Monitoring changes in forest height, biomass and carbon stock is important for understanding the drivers of forest change, clarifying the geography and magnitude of the fluxes of the global carbon budget and for providing input data to REDD+. The obj...
Knowledge of river bathymetry is crucial for accurately simulating river flows and floodplain inundation. However, field data are scarce, and the depth and shape of the river channels cannot be systematically observed via remote sensing. Therefore, a...
High-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) are important for relevant geoscience research and practical applications. Compared with traditional hardware-based methods, super-resolution (SR) reconstruction techniques are currently low-cost and fe...
The global digital elevation model (DEM) is important for various scientific applications. With the recently released TanDEM-X 90-m DEM and AW3D30 version 2.2, the open global or near-global coverage DEM datasets have been further expanded. However,...
This study assessed the uncertainty in flood impact assessment (FIA) that may be introduced by errors in moderate resolution regional and moderate resolution global Digital Elevation Models (DEM). One arc-second National Elevation Dataset (NED) and o...
Flood hazard and risk analysis in developing countries is a difficult task due to the absence or scarce availability of flow data and digital elevation models (DEMs) with the necessary quality. Up to eight DEMs (ALOS Palsar, Aster GDEM, Bare Earth DE...
Lake volume variation is closely related to climate change and human activities, which can be monitored by multi-source remote-sensing data from space. Although there are usually two routine ways to construct the lake volume by the digital elevation...
To date, digital terrain model (DTM) accuracy has been studied almost exclusively by computing its height variable. However, the largely ignored horizontal component bears a great influence on the positional accuracy of certain linear features, e.g.,...
This paper addresses the problems arising from the use of data acquired with two different remote sensing techniques—high-resolution satellite imagery (HRSI) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS)—for the extraction of digital elevation mod...
High-resolution DEMs are important spatial data, and are used in a wide range of analyses and applications. However, the high cost to obtain high-resolution DEM data over a large area through sensors with higher precision poses a challenge for many g...
Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of Greenland provide the basic data for studying the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS), but little research quantitatively evaluates and compares the accuracy of various Greenland DEMs. This study uses IceBridge elevation dat...
Topography is a crucial surface characteristic in soil erosion modeling. Soil erosion studies use a digital elevation model (DEM) to derive the topographical characteristics of a study area. Majority of the times, a DEM is incorporated into erosion m...
At least 10 global digital elevation models (DEMs) at one-arc-second resolution now cover Earth. Comparing derived grids, like slope or curvature, preserves surface spatial relationships, and can be more important than just elevation values. Such com...
The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) represents a rather innovative, quick, and low-cost methodological approach offering applications in several fields of investigation. The present study illustrates the developed method using Digital Elevatio...
Three-dimensional information provided by TanDEM-X interferometric phase and airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) were used to detect differences in vegetation heterogeneity through a disturbance gradient in In...
Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is an effective technology for generating high-precision digital elevation models (DEMs). However, the vertical accuracy of InSAR DEMs is limited by the contradiction between height measurement sensiti...
Defining stream channels in a watershed is important for assessing freshwater habitat availability, complexity, and quality. However, mapping channels of small tributary streams becomes challenging due to frequent channel change and dense vegetation...
The subway alleviates the traffic pressure in the city but also brings the potential risk of land subsidence. The land subsidence caused by the subway is a global problem that seriously affects the safety of subway operations and surrounding building...
Flood disasters are increasing worldwide due to climate change, posing growing risks to infrastructure and human life. Korea, where nearly 70% of annual rainfall occurs during the summer monsoon, is particularly vulnerable to extreme precipitation ev...
A reliable Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is a key input for land use planning and risk management, particularly in floodplains where low-resolution models often fail to represent subtle topographic variations. In many regions worldwide, high-precisio...
The positive and negative terrains (P–N terrains) of the Loess Plateau of China are important geographical topography elements for measuring the degree of surface erosion and distinguishing the types of landforms. Loess shoulder-lines are an im...
The scarcity of high-resolution urban digital elevation model (DEM) datasets, particularly in certain developing countries, has posed a challenge for many water-related applications such as flood risk management. A solution to address this is to deve...
Slope is an important topographical parameter in hydrological models. Dramatic changes in slope are produced due to micro variations of topography in flow diversion terrace (FDT) systems. Assessing the effectiveness of FDT on soil conservation yields...
22 February 2026
We assessed the vertical accuracy of six global digital elevation models—FABDEM (SRTM-enhanced), SRTM, ASTER GDEM, ALOS AW3D30, DeltaDTM and GEDTM—against a local photogrammetry-derived DEM as a benchmark in a flat coastal plain of the Co...
The overall objective of this work is to apply GIS-based cost distance modeling (CDM) to site catchment modeling and analysis of prehistoric (Solutrean) sites in Andalusia. The implementation of a GIS-method for slope-based CDM was explained in detai...
This study compares four digital elevation models (DEMs), based on various data sources, to define polder retention capacities. Two commercial and two publically available, free of charge data sources were used. Commercial sources are DEMs based on a...
An analysis of almost 200 references has been carried out in order to obtain knowledge about the DEM (Digital Elevation Model) accuracy assessment methods applied in the last three decades. With regard to grid DEMs, 14 aspects related to the accuracy...
28 March 2019
Topographic parameters of high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) with meter to sub-meter spatial resolution, such as slope, curvature, openness, and wetness index, show the spatial properties and surface characterizations of terrains. The mu...
Spaceborne sensors are now providing invaluable datasets for the Earth’s surface studies. The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) with the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) was launched by NASA on 15 Septembe...
A new model called the Transformer-Unet Generative Adversarial Network (TUGAN) is proposed for super-resolution reconstruction of digital elevation models (DEMs). Digital elevation models are used in many fields, including environmental science, geol...
Digital elevation models (DEMs) are considered an imperative tool for many 3D visualization applications; however, for applications related to topography, they are exploited mostly as a basic source of information. In the study of landslide susceptib...
Monitoring glacier changes in remote Arctic regions are strongly facilitated by satellite data. This is especially true for the Russian Arctic where recently increased optical and SAR satellite imagery (Landsat 8 OLI, Sentinel 1/2), and digital eleva...
This study describes a new method developed to determine the 3D positional displacements of the drainage networks extracted from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). The proposed method establishes several stages for data preparation. The displacements a...
The Open-Source Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is fundamental data of the geoscientific community. However, the variation of its accuracy with land cover type and topography has not been thoroughly studied. This study evaluates the accuracy of five gl...
Archaeological topography identification from high-resolution DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) is a current method that is used with high success in archaeological prospecting of wide areas. I present a methodology through which burial mounds (tumuli)...
Having highly accurate and reliable Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of the Earth’s surface is critical to orthorectify Landsat imagery. Without such accuracy, pixel locations reported in the data are difficult to assure as accurate, especially...
Abstract: Terraces are typical artificial landforms on the Loess Plateau, with ecological functions in water and soil conservation, agricultural production, and biodiversity. Recording the spatial distribution of terraces is the basis of monitoring t...
Gully erosion in valley bottoms is a frequent process with negative consequences in the dehesa environment. Soil loss, decrease of soil and descend in biomass are among the negative aftereffect of gully erosion processes. Studies conducted in agrosil...
Rock glaciers result from the long-term creeping of ice-rich permafrost along mountain slopes. Under warming conditions, deformation is expected to increase, and potential destabilization of those landforms may lead to hazardous phenomena. Monitoring...
The spaceborne mission TanDEM-X successfully acquired and processed a global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) from interferometric bistatic SAR data at X band. The product has been delivered in 2016 and is characterized by an unprecedented vertical accu...
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