COMPARISON OF ASTER AND SRTM DIGITAL ELEVATION MODELS AT ONE-ARC-SECOND RESOLUTION OVER TURKEY

In February 2000, the “Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM)” satellite captured elevation data by scanning the Earth landmasses between the 60^o North and South latitudes. After the mission of 11 days, the collected data were processed, and a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) within one arc- second resolution for United States and three arc-second resolutions for the other parts of the globe was created and published on the NASA servers. Recently, a global SRTM DEM with one- arc-second resolution has been released. Additionally, ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) is a sensor boarded on the Terra satellite in 1999. The sensor has been collecting satellite imagery since 2000. The ASTER GDEM at one-second resolution was released to the public, which is the most complete DEM of the earth ever made. In this study, SRTM and ASTER DEMs with one arc-second resolution over Turkish territory was evaluated by means of a local DEM produced from 1:25K national topographic maps. Results show that the accuracy of the SRTM DEM is better than the ASTER GDEM with respect to the local DEM.