We merged various digital elevation models (DEMs) published in the recent years and created an up-to-date composite and global solution for Earth’s topography and bathymetry. Compared to the original geographically limited data sets, the final product is a seamless merged grid which additionally provides high resolution and accuracy topography and depth globally.
We provide Earth relief grids w.r.t EIGEN-6C4 global geoid in terms of surface and bedrock elevation, ice thickness, and land-type masks which have been substantially improved w.r.t the global grids found in literature. We assessed the quality of the merged surface elevations w.r.t the heights given for about globally distributed 5000 ITRF stations. The merged surface model shows improvement of a factor of three w.r.t the other commonly used DEMs in terms of standard deviation. In addition to the four grids, GDEMM2024_SUR, GDEMM2024_BED, GDEMM2024_ICE, and GDEMM2024_LTM, we provide two additional files, the surface elevation without water (GDEMM2024_TBI) and the GDEMM2024_GEO file to transform the heights above EIGEN_6C4 geoid to ellipsoidal heights. The final grids are provided both in 30 arcsec and 1arcmin resolution and in GeoTIFF format which is one of the standards that is available in GMT (Generic Mapping Tools), GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) and in almost all GIS software systems.
The DFG Priority Program 1803 “EarthShape” (www.earthshape.net) investigates Earth surface shaping by biota. As part of this project, we present Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data of land surface areas for the four core research sites of the project. The research sites are located along a latitudinal gradient between ~26 °S and ~38 °S in the Chilean Coastal Cordillera. From north to south, the names of these sites are: National Park Pan de Azúcar; Private Reserve Santa Gracia; National Park La Campana; and National Park Nahuelbuta.
The three datasets contain raw 3D point cloud data captured from an airborne LiDAR system, and the following derivative products: a) digital terrain models (DTM, sometimes also referred to as DEM [digital elevation model]) which are (2.5D) raster datasets created by rendering only the LiDAR returns which are assumed to be ground/bare-earth returns and b) digital surface models (DSM) which are also 2.5D raster datasets produced by rendering all the returns from the top of the Earth’s surface, including all objects and structures (e.g. buildings and vegetation).
The LiDAR data were acquired in 2008 (southernmost Nahuelbuta [NAB] catchment), 2016 (central La Campana [LC] catchment) and 2020 (central Santa Gracia [SGA] catchment). Except for Nahuelbuta (data already was available from the data provider from a previous project), the flights were carried out as part of the "EarthShape" project. The LiDAR raw data (point cloud/ *.las files) were compressed, merged (as *.laz files) and projected using UTM 19 S (UTM 18 S for the southernmost Nahuelbuta catchment, respectively) and WGS84 as coordinate reference system.
A complementary fourth dataset for the northernmost site in the National Park Pan de Azúcar, derived from Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flights and Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry, is expected to be obtained during the first half of 2022 and will be added to the above data set.
This data publication is a high resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) generated for the Merapi summit by combining terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) photogrammetry data acquired in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The structures of the data are further analysed in Darmawan et al. 2017 (http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2017.11.006).
The published datasets consist of combined point clouds with ~65 million data points and a DEM with a resampled resolution of 0.5 m. The DEM data covers the complexity of the Merapi summit with area of 2 km2. The coordinate of the datasets is projected to global coordinates (WGS 1984 UTM Zone 49 South).
TLS is a topography mapping technique which exploits the travel time of a laser beam to measure the range between the ground-based scanning instrument and the earth’s surface. TLS provides high accuracy, precision, and resolution for topography mapping, however, it requires different scan position to obtain accurate topography model in a complex topography. The TLS dataset was acquired by using a long-range RIEGL VZ-6000 instrument with a Pulse Repetition Rate (PRR) of 30 kHz.
The Merapi data includes an observation range of 0.129 – 4393.75 m, a theta range (vertical) of 73 – 120° with a sampling angle of 0.041°, a phi range (horizontal) of 33° - 233° with a sampling angle of 0.05°, and 12 reflectors for each scan. The used TLS dataset was achieved by combining two scan positions, both realized in September 2014. In order to reduce still eminent shadowing, we conducted additionally a UAV photogrammetry survey. The UAV data allows to fill data gaps and generate a complete 3D point cloud.
The UAV photogrammetry was conducted by using DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter drone in October 2015. The drone carried GoPro HERO 3+ camera and a H3-3D gimbal to reduce image shaking. We obtained over 300 images which cover the summit area of Merapi. By applying the Structure from Motion algorithm, we are able to generate a 3D point cloud model of Merapi summit. Further details on this procedure are provided in Darmawan et al. (2017).
Structure from Motion is a technique to generate a 3D model based on 2D overlapped images. The algorithm detects and matches the same ground features of 2D images, reconstructs a 3D scene, and calculates a depth map for each camera frame. The algorithm used is implemented in Agisoft Photoscan Professional software. After importing the images in Agisoft, we used the ‘align image’ function with high accuracy setting to generate 3D sparse point cloud and ‘build dense cloud’ function with high quality to generate 3D dense point cloud.
The 3D point clouds of TLS and UAV photogrammetry were then georeferenced to our georeferenced 3D point cloud which acquired in 2012. The RMS of TLS and UAV photogrammetry during georeferenced is 0.60 and 0.44 m, respectively, as described in Further details on this procedure are provided in Darmawan et al. (2017). After georeferencing, both 3D point clouds were merged and interpolated to a raster format in the ArcMap software.