March 18, 2015 — The availability of WorldDEM, the global pole-to-pole Digital Elevation Model, is continuously expanding and now extends to more than 50% of the Earth’s landmass. The 3D mapping database now covers large parts of Northern and Southern America, Western and Southern Africa, Middle East, Australia, Northern Europe and Asia. The newest additions to the database are complete coverages of Scandinavia, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Angola and Saudi Arabia.
Explore WorldDEM availability: www.geo-airbusds.com/worlddem-db
Since its commercial launch in April 2014, WorldDEM has been providing the first global, single-source, high-precision Digital Elevation Model and establishes a new standard of global elevation models. Multiple applications have already benefitted from this game-changing dataset among them mining studies in equatorial regions with dense vegetation, or infrastructure corridor design and costing. Military and civil aviation also take advantage of WorldDEM, especially for low altitude flight path and landing area planning for helicopters and aircraft even in remote and difficult to access areas.
Airbus Defence and Space holds the exclusive commercial distribution rights for the WorldDEM data and is building the global database according to customer requirements. Its main feature is pole-to-pole coverage without any break lines at regional or national borders and no heterogeneities caused by differing measurement procedures or data collection campaigns staggered in time.
Bernhard Brenner, Head of the Geo-Intelligence Programme Line at Airbus Defence and Space, said: “Today, with WorldDEM data available for more than 50% of the global landmass, we are able to meet our most demanding customers’ needs. The unrivalled accuracy and quality on such a scale makes WorldDEM the elevation model of choice for any projects requiring global terrain information with a very high level of detail.”
WorldDEM is based on data acquired by the high-resolution radar satellites TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X, which started synchronous data acquisition in December 2010 and completed coverage of the Earth’s entire landmass twice over in mid-2013. The satellites covered more complex terrain areas with a third and fourth acquisition campaign to ensure consistent high quality and accuracy of the final product. Just as the data acquisition by the two radar satellites was conducted successively, production is also done progressively.
