WorlDEM, as seen at Wilpena Pound, South Australia © DLR e.V. 2014 and © Airbus DS Geo GmbH 2014
The availability of WorldDEM, a pole-to-pole Digital Elevation Model from Airbus Defence & Space, now extends to more than 50% of the Earth’s landmass. The 3D mapping database now covers large parts of Australia, Northern and Southern America, Western and Southern Africa, Middle East, Northern Europe and Asia. The newest additions to the database are complete coverages of Scandinavia, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Angola, and Saudi Arabia.
WorldDEM was launched commercially in April 2014, and, according to Airbus D&S, multiple applications have already benefitted from the dataset, including 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.
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.
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.”
You can Explore WorldDEM availability here.
