U.S. Releases Enhanced Shuttle Land Elevation Data

On September 23, 2014, the White House announced that the highest-resolution topographic data generated from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) in 2000 will be released globally over the next year. The announcement was made at the United Nations Heads of State Climate Summit in New York. Since then the schedule has been accelerated, and all global SRTM data, except for the Middle East region, has been released.

See the full JPL Release 2014-321.

Previously, SRTM data for regions outside the United States were sampled for public release at 3 arc-seconds, which is 1/1200th of a degree of latitude and longitude, or about 90 meters (295 feet). The new data are being released with a 1 arc-second, or about 30 meters (98 feet), sampling that reveals the full resolution of the original measurements. Data for most of Africa and its surrounding areas were released with the September 2014 announcement. The next release, in November 2014 included all of South America and North America, most of Europe, and islands in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The most recent release, in January 2015 includes most of continental Asia (now including India), the East Indies, Australia, New Zealand, and islands of the western Pacific.

See an index map of the newly available full-resolution data. (SRTM did not produce data for the northernmost latitudes or Antarctica.)

The new data are available for download from the USGS EROS Data Center - see Public Data Distribution for details.

See the Africa image above and its caption at the PIA04965. A fly around video of the Crater Highlands of Tanzania, using SRTM elevation data and Landsat images is available at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1335. id=1335.

These additional fly around videos further illustrate SRTM elevation data:

India and the Himalaya Mountains, with Landsat satellite images draped over SRTM elevation data. View the full size movie here. A smaller version can be viewed here.

Indonesia, with many volcanoes, starting at Bali, flying westward over Java, and ending at Krakatoa (Pulau Krakatau). This fly around uses only SRTM data, shaded and with colored height. View the movie here.

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