Ideas For Exploiting NASA's SRTM Data 124
MaxTardiveau writes with an excerpt from an article where the pictures are worth clicking through for: "Ten years ago, in February 2000, NASA mapped the entire world in eleven days. It's true: the mission was called the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), and over the course of eleven days, it used a big radar attached to the space shuttle to get elevation data from the vast majority of solid Earth; practically all land between 60 degrees North and 56 degrees South was included, with a resolution of 30 meters (90 feet). Over 9 terabytes of data were captured. It then took two years to process that data and make it usable (and it is still being refined to this day). This data is freely available to anyone, and the number of possible applications is almost infinite. It's been used in GIS, cartography, environmental planning, weather modeling (weather patterns are enormously influenced by the topography), flight simulators, Google Earth, and the list goes on. In this short article, I would like to give you a quick tour of the kinds of things this data can reveal. My hope is to get you thinking about what else could be done with this incredible resource."
Re:Games (Score:2, Insightful)
Especially to get realistic mountain range layouts. No longer do you have to sit there and tesselate or deal with fractals, you can just download mother nature's fractal mountain set and go to town.
Don't you love weasel language (Score:4, Insightful)
1. mapped the entire world in eleven days.
2. vast majority of solid Earth
3. practically all land between 60 degrees North and 56 degrees South was included, with a resolution of 30 meters (90 feet).
Mmm, within ONE paragraph the writer sure lowers his tune. ALL the earth vs a part of it and then that part of it that is land and not sea? Anyone remember why it is called the Blue Planet at times? Because the majority of the surface is water?
Interesting news of course, but come on, can we at least on a tech site skip the hyperbole.
Meters are not yards (Score:5, Insightful)
I know Americans like to equate meters with yards, and when dealing with a small number, this is a close enough approximation for most purposes. However, 30 meters is 98.4 feet, so a better approximation for the purposes of this post would have been 100 feet.
Didn't we learn our lesson regarding sloppy unit conversions during one of our recent multi-million dollar collisions with Mars? ;)
Re:Canada and USSR way ahead in this area. (Score:4, Insightful)
RADARSAT is a commercial service.
(SRTM) data is freely available to anyone.
I know which set I'll be using if I want to play around with this data.
Re:Games (Score:1, Insightful)
The fractals are easy to store, they can be define with just a few seed-like numbers for the random number generator. Storing shitloads of data acquired in the real world might not just be practical.
Re:Games (Score:1, Insightful)
just over 9000!!